Russia Under The Red Flag

A RECORD OF SOCIALISM IN OUR TIME
BY
G. M. GODDEN
LONDON
URNS OATES & WASHBOURNE LTD.
TO THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE
I
P:RJNTED lN GREAT BRITAIN
FOREWORD
T
HIS book gives a short account, taken
from Russian sources, of the greatest
experiment in Socialism in our time.
lt supplies a summary of the results of this ex-
riment in regard to government, religion, educa-
tion, personal and political liberty, industry, and
the land.
And, if the geographical and cultural remoteness
f the Russian peoples inclines the Englishman
l ut slightly acquainted with international re-
a tions to say, ' What is Russia to me ? ' the
1 ply is: Russia, to-day, is the complete example
of the change which the English electorate is
t. ked to effect at every election-that of trans-
forming the English Constitution into a Socialist
St. te. In the ' United Soviet and Socialist Re-
I ublics' of Soviet Russia, Socialism can be
ul crved in active control of every relation of
lif . In Soviet Russia may be seen reflected, as
in a mirror, the new England which Socialism is
triving, with great energy, to create. And,
110rcover, the Soviet Government, to the support
I which, by diplomatic recognition, the English
o ialist and Labour Party is pledged, is ceaselessly
v
vi
FOREWORD
engaged in the endeavour to erect, on the ruins
of existing civilizations, States similar to its own
throughout the world.
Some knowledge of Russia, as she is to-day
after eleven years of government under the
Red Flag, is of intimate concern to all English
men and women who value religious, political,
and industrial freedom.
G. M. GoDDEN.
March 1929.
t i A P t ~ R
I.
II.
III.
IV.
v.
VI.
!I.
lfl.
CONTENTS
PAGR
' ALL PoWER To THE SoviETS ' I
SOVIETS AND COMMISSARS 20
THE SoviET GoVERNMENT AND REumoN
37
THE SoviET GoVERNMENT AND EoucATION
70
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND LIBERTY g6
THE SoviET GoVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY 131
THE SoviET GoVERNMENT AND THE LAND . 154
THE SoviET GoVERNMENT AND THE PEOPLE . 178
"Liberty is a bourgeois superstition."
Lenin.
RUSSIA UNDER THE
RED FLAG
CHAPTER I
' ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS '
' The speech of Lenin is a hammer, which smashes relentlessly all
obstacles.' -MAXIM GORKI.
T
HE night of April 13, 1917, saw the
launching of an offensive against the
present social order of Europe, and of
the East. From that moment there began, in
Russia, the erection of an international power-
house whence are directed live currents of dis-
ruption against all existing States. The leader
of sixty revolutionaries, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,
declared that April night, as he and his colleagues
tepped out from their German train, that the
dawn of a world-wide Revolution was at hand.
Revolutions are no new thing. The new thing
that then leaped into active being was a systematic
attempt to crush, either by the hammer-blows
of main force, or by the penetration of subtle
unceasing intrigue, the constitutional govern-
ments, the existing moral codes, and the religious
faiths of the world.
Lenin showed an incredulous Europe how
2
RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
one man, guided by a tactical genius for revolu-
tion, and animated by a ruthless determination,
can capture and break up the entire mechanism
of a great State, and remould it to his own
imperious will. Having destroyed the fabric of
the new Russian Republic, he proceeded to at-
tempt the undermining of all constituted authority,
in two hemispheres. His emissaries were found
at work in Europe, in America, throughout the
East. And on his death his lieutenants have
carried on his aims with the fanaticism of disciples.
The attack directed by these new rulers of Russia
against all other civilizations has not slackened
for an instant. ' Lenin is dead, but his works
live on,' declares the inscription on his tomb
in the Kremlin. At the moment of his death it
was recognized, even by the most bitter of his
opponents, that this man had let loose new and
incalculable forces that would not die with him.
' He was something that is not known even yet.
He was a force that is everywhere felt.' Men
said of him that analogies for his actions must be
sought in remote and barbarous periods of the
world's history. He pulverized his opponents
by an unexampled use of terrorism. ' Where
Robespierre slew by thousands, Lenin slew by
tens of thousands.' He erected in Russia a
centre, and a starting point, for the dissemination
of new theories of human existence. And theory
with Lenin was always, as he himself declaimed,
' not a dogma, but a manual of action.'
' ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS ,
3
It was this manual of action which Lenin
-""ntinually urged on his hearers, and which he
-.L. eloped, completed, and unified into a system of
7
vemment, from that first speech delivered on
is arrival at the Petrograd station. As he stood on
be t op of an armoured car, lit up by the flare of
archlights, and surrounded by the red banners of
volution, he called on the people, surging he-
ath him, to recast the world: 'Dear Com-
ades, soldiers, sailors, workers, this is the begin-
ing of civil war throughout Europe. Long live
l1e world-wide revolution ! ' It was from that
1ight that Lenin, by his magnetic speeches, by his
I ng-prepared and swiftly intuitive action, gained
l1e domination of Russia, and attempted to gain
he domination of Europe and the East. His
peeches, like his leadership, were resonant of an
on will. 'He hammers his audience until they
ubmit, lose their senses, and are taken prisoners,'
,""' ..._.id Sukhanov, in this same year, 1917. 'Lenin
a guillotine that thinks,' said another, feeling the
rnerciless brain, hard and sharp as the edge of a
t el blade. ' Lenin,' said Gorki, ' speaks with an
iron tongue, with the logic of an axe ! His speech is
l1ammer which smashes relentlessly all obstacles.'
T he first blows of this hammer destroyed,
lentlessly, the newly created Russian Republican
tate. ' The people,' said Lenin,' must break up
1 machine of the State ; this I have pointed out
any times, since the fourth of August 1917.'
1
1
N. Lenin, Will the Bolshevists maintain Power?, p. 38 .
4
This was the first act of the world drama planned
by the brain of Lenin. But the brain of Lenin was
always that of the internationalist. Having
broken up the State machine, and replaced it by a
new one, the victorious people were then to become
' the vanguard of the International Revolutionary
Proletariat. '
1
They are to fulfil the task of develop-
ing, supporting, and awakening revolution in all
countries. The ruthless blows of the red hammer
are not only a Russian, they are an international
phenomenon.
Lenin, doubtless, owed his sudden advent to
power in Russia partly to that instinct to ' break
out and to smash' which a competent observer
declares to have been latent in the Russian masses
for centuries.
2
The Russian word buntar ex-
presses this national tendency. A buntar is a man
who is ready to smash through any opposition, one
indeed who rejoices, from exuberance of vigour,
in meeting with the greatest opposition. Russian
history is full of outbreaks of elemental hatred, led
by buntars. ' Lenin,' we are told,' is probably the
last of the Russian buntars.' He is also the first of
international buntars, endeavouring to force upon
the world a new and violent creed of human
relationships. In the course of ten years Europe
has become familiar with this apostolate. To
ignore an international offensive of this magnitude
would be fatuous. To over-estimate it is, perhaps,
1
N. Lenin, What i s to be done ?, 1902, and the Proletarian
Revolution.
a Michael Farbman, Bolshevism i n Retreat , p . 56.
5
y. To understand it, it is necessary to know
l ~ results of eleven years of the ' iron grip,' to use
Z111ovieff's phrase, of Leninism in Russia. In
t her countries this new and strange social pheno-
111 non can only be studied in fragmentary forms;
1 n Russia, from Octo her I 9 I 7 to the spring of I 92 I ,
tl can be seen in operation unhampered by any
1 training force; from I92I onwards it can be
n restrained by force of external circumstances
hut untouched in essence.
The little group of Leninists, the Russian
'ommunists or Bolsheviki, were already, while
111 exile, fully imbued with their leader's dogma
l hat ' proletarian revolution is impossible without
the violent destruction of the bourgeois govern-
' ntal machine, and the putting of a new one in
it place.'
1
It was not the historic Russian
.tutocracy of the Tsars which fell beneath the
I dge-hammer blows of Lenin in I9I7. It was
t h new Russian Republic ; a ' democratic hour-
' is republic, more free considering the state of
<lr,' as Lenin himself declared,' than that of any
th r country in the world.'
2
It was the new
ltcpublic, with its provisional Government, under
II premiership of Kerensky, the peaceful advent
>f v hich had been hailed by Maxim Gorki as the
' unniest and greatest of all Revolutions.' The
1 t rays of that republican sun shone out on the
1
Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution. It is affirmed that
I (n was preparing for the Bolshevik seizure of power as early
vt>mber 1914, and that by October 1915 he had elaborated his
mme of the Revolution in detail.
1
Lenin, Left Wing Communism, pp. 15, 99
6 RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
day of the abdication of the Tsar, on March 15,
1917 ; the last rays sank in blood-red clouds,
six months later, to the sound of a cry new
to the ears of the world : ' All power to the
Soviets.'
To the Russian of 1917 the word' soviet' con-
veyed little more than strike committee ; and he
would perhaps have replied to questions as to the
nature of this new growth with some Russian
equivalent for the English phrase' talking shops.'
And for months the Soviets, which began to
appear in every town, in every village, in every
factory, in every regiment, and on the battleships
of the fleet, were little more than centres for dis-
cussion. In June the force behind the Soviets
found them sufficiently organized for delegates to
be sent to a first All Russian Congress of Soviets,
held in Petrograd. 'fhe delegates arrived from all
parts of Russia, and included both soldier delegates
and sailors from the five Russian fleets. In this
Congress the Communist delegates, the Bol-
shevists, formed a small minority group represent-
ing a party membership of xso,ooo. Six months
later they were the rulers of Russia.
During those summer months of 1917 this
small minority was busy with propaganda, pouring
out, every day, ' bales and car loads of Bolshevik
gospel in print.'
1
Petrograd published Pravda
(Truth), The Soldier, and The Village Poor in
1
A. R . Williams, Through the Russian Revolution, p. 23. Labour
Publishing Co., 38 Great Ormond Street.
7
dlions of copies. But propaganda is useless
1! 'S allied to a policy ; and the organizers of the
111 rity group assumed to themselves, with
n ummate revolutionary strategy, four battle-
corresponding to the four needs of which the
1 ian people were at that moment most con-
aous. These four propaganda cries were the
d of putting an end to the war, the need of free
IJing of land, the removal of the food shortage,
1 tl political liberty. Thus was utilized the mass-
1 111gcr for peace ; the mass-hunger for land ;
h 'uffering from lack of food ; and the deep
m ing for political rights. Also, the minority
m p, during this summer, crystallized their
,}i y in the eyes of the people by constant
1 > sions of soldiers, sailors, and workmen
I 1 mgh the streets. ' Who can forget Petrograd of
I ? 'writes an eye-witness. ' Soldiers in drab
live, horsemen in blue and gold, white-
d sailors from the fleet, black-bloused work-
n each a scarlet handkerchief or a red sash.
I o all, like crimson foam, sparkled and tossed a
1 and banners of red. And from the resonant
f the soldiers, workmen, from the plaintive
1 l f the working women came the refrains of
r volutionary marching songs.'
1
The red
nn r carried the carefully chosen appeals to
na es of Russian workers,-Factories to the
I t r I Land to the peasants I Down with the
! And the Provisional Government, smitten
1 Ibid., p. 26.
with provisional blindness, took no heed of these
things. As the Russian proverb says: 'They
went to the circus, but they did not see the
elephant.' And their false security gained in
assurance by the rapid quelling of Lenin's attempt
at armed revolt late in July, an attempt suppressed
by loyal troops, brought into Petrograd. Lenin
and Zinovieff went into hiding. Trotzky and
Kameneff went into prison. And the Petrograd
Soviet gave its adherence to Kerensky. Six
months later those very troops, permeated with
propaganda, were in the forefront of the insurrec-
tion. ' The troops were called in to conquer
Petrograd ; but in the end Petrograd conquers
them.'
The record of these six months of 1917 is one of
democratic inefficiency, in the face of ceaseless
revolutionary efficiency, directed by the greatest
mechanic of revolution known to history, Lenin.
Still, the democrats put up a fight that did not lack
vigour-in words. The militant reformer Mikhail-
ovsky stigmatized the class-struggle, which is
the soul of Leninism, as a ' school of bestiality
from which men issue as live corpses, with
faces distorted with rage.' The distortion of
rage has now been wi tnessed, for eleven ensuing
years, through Leninist Russia; but the corpses
have proved to be singularly alive. Rage was at
work already in that summer of 1917, when
Russia was drawing her first breath of freedom,
after the fall of the autocracy, and when ' nothing
9
t rned impossible to a great nation which had
rne to its own, after centuries of bondage.'
nin might be in hiding ; Trotzky might be in
rson ; but the propaganda of class hatred went
.r, without ceasing. And Lenin proved himself
in defeat, no less than in victory. The
let Central Executive Committee, elected by
1
' All Russian Congress of Soviets, had swung
lin 'left ' to 'right,' in other words was
'pporting Kerensky. Lenin instantly altered his
n tactics, and demanded, from his secret head-
qu.trters, the destruction of the existing Soviet.
I even dropped the watchword, ' All power to
I Soviets.' And he directed the next assault on
h l' emocratic Provisional Government under the
lngan of 'Up with the Dictatorship of the
I 1 ol tariat.' Then Kerensky, by a fatal effort to
1.1blish a military autocracy, with the aid of
n ral Komilov, gave the minority leader an
J )()rtunity he was quick to seize. From the
.ttive attitude of merely dropping the slogan
\II power to the Soviets,' Lenin advanced to the
f a new slogan- ' Conquer the Soviets
111 within,'- those Soviets now allied with the
lliOCratic Provisional Government. To conquer
rring Soviets ' from within '- this was the
1 I of stratagem in which his acute mind de-
l tnt : ' Ilyich liked stratagem especially. To
r n t he enemy, to get the better of him-was
anything better than that ? '
1
So, from his
1
Trotzky, Lenin, p. 1 23.
IO
secure hiding place in Finland, he offered a truce
to the Democratic Soviet Committee, in return
for 'absolute freedom of propaganda.'
In less than three months the conquest from
within, by means of this absolute freedom of
propaganda, was effected. The
the Bolsheviki were transformed Into a maJority
in the Moscow Soviet. On September 23
Trotzky was elected chairman of the Petrograd
Soviet. In the same month Lenin promulgated
his theory of a Republic of Soviets. Six months
earlier he had put forward the idea that Councils,
or Soviets, might be utilized as a new form of
popular representation, as ' the embryo of .a new
organization of the State.'
1
Now Lentn re-
affirmed this new political formula ; although he
was careful to reserve a place therein for a Con-
stituent Assembly. The idea of a Constituent
Assembly had been the desired of
people for two .. Knowtng Lemn
with his unerring tacttcal sktll, launched hts slo
of ' All power to the Soviets ' as ' an indispe11s
able preliminary to the convocation of th
Constituent Assembly. '
2
The next strategic step was hastened by Lenin'
fear that the Provisional Government migh
garrison Petrograd with ' loyal ' troops, before
capture ' from ' of the So':iets had bee
completely consohdated. He left Fmland ; and a
1 M. Farbman, Bolshevism in Retreat, p. 146.
s Trotzky, Lenin, p. 123.
' ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS ' II
he end of September, or early in October, attended
1 11ight session of the Communist party, held in
1 house in Petrograd. All night Lenin urged that
wer must be seized at once, and by armed
rce. He imposed his will upon the secret
with ' intense and impassioned im-
rovisations, which were filled with the struggle to
n press upon the opponents, the hesitating, tl1e
l ubting, the course of his thought, his will, his
11viction, his courage.'
1
That night the fate of
I Russian Revolution was decided. The meeting
ke up late, and' all felt,' says Trotzky, 'some-
hat as though they had gone through an
1 eration.'
On October 9 Lenin issued a manifesto declaring
hat ' the crisis is ripe, and there can be no doubt
hat we are standing at the gates of the proletarian
orld Revolution.' By October 25 Trotzky was
le to report that, already, important strategic
ints in Petrograd were secured. Lenin, still in
i ing, and sometimes in disguise, continually
tnbarded his party with Press articles, pam-
llets, and messages. On this last moment of
paration he concentrated all his powers of
I arness and of precision, all his grasp of reality.
utilized, now, the ceaseless work begun from
1 very first days of his arrival in Petrograd the
rk of the student in gaining detailed knowledge
the economic and political conditions of the
; and the work, in orgat1ization, of the skilful
t Ibid., p. 120.
12 R SSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
cotnmatlder. It \as Lenin, alone, who had drawn
up the sche11 e of actio11 of l1is party in all its details
as regards military policy, economic policy, food
policy, long before he launched the revolution on
the night of November 7 It was Lenin who
brought into line all who doubted or hesitated.
1
On Sunday, November 4, six enormous mass
meetings were held in Petrograd ; and Trotzky
assumed control of a Military Revolutionary Com-
mittee. The Democratic Provisional Government
called in troops such as the Zenith Battery and the
Cyclists' Battalion. As the columns marched
towards the city they were met by Communist
missionaries, who attacked them, not with guns,
but with ideas, and by a withering fire of arguments
and pleading ; and the troops that were being
rushed into the city to crush the Revolution,
became its supporters. Even the Cossacks suc-
cumbed. ' Brotl1er Cossacks,' ran the appeal,' you
are being incited against us by grafters, parasites,
landlords, to crush our Revolution. Comrade
Cossacks, do not fall in with the plan ! ' The
appeal prevailed ; and the Cossacks also lined up
under the red flag of revolt. The Military Revolu-
tionary Committee was further reinforced by
another Committee,' the Committee of a Hundred
Thousand,' that is, the masses tl1emselves. 'There
are no by-streets, no barracks, no buildings, where
this committee does not penetrate. It reaches
into the Kere11sky Government, into the intelli-
1 Zinovieff, Nicolai Lenin, 1918, p. 43
' ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS ' 13
gentsia. With porters, waiters, cabmen, con-
ductors, soldiers, sailors it covers the city like a
net. They hear everything, report everything to
l1eadquarters. Thus forewarned they can check-
mate every move of the enemy. Every attempt to
strangle or sidetrack the Revolution they paralyse
at once.'
1
At last Kerensky attacked Lenin openly
as a ' state criminal.' Lenin instantly counter-
attacked, by emerging from his place of hiding.
-Ie arrived at the Smolny Institute, surrounded by
an enthusiastic crowd. The Smolny was then
fortified by an armed guard. The Commandant
\vas a delicate-featured, fair-haired Pole, with a
\Vinning smile, whose name was to become a
1 yword of terror, Felix Dzerjinsky.
On November 5 it was reported that the officers
in command of the fortress of Peter and Paul, the
uns of whicl1 command the whole of Petrograd,
;vere intending to support the Democratic Govern-
nent. Trotzky proposed to capture the fortress
' from within ' by propaganda. He went himself ;
and after his speech the entire garrison declared
or the Minority Bolshevik Movement. The last
11ilitary stronghold of Democracy in Petrograd
had fallen, without a single shot being fired. On
tl1e following day Kerensky and his Ministers
etired to the Winter Palace. On the night of
ovember 7 the All Russian Congress of Soviets
assembled for its second sitting, in the Smolny
Institute. The faith of the people in the power of
t A. R. \ Villiams, Through the Russian Revolution, p. 95
their new Soviets to bring them freedom was still
strong. An American eye-witness has recorded
how he saw, that night, a labourer shabbily clothed
and gaunt bread queues were already standing
outside the bakers' shops in Petrograd plodding
down the street. Lifting his head, suddenly the
poor workman saw the massive f ~ d e of the
Smolny, with a hundred lighted windows, glowing
golden through the falling snow. Pulling off his
cap he stood for a moment with bared head and
outstretched arms. Then crying out : The
Commune! The People! The Revolution! he ran
forward towards the building. During the night,
as the roar of the naval guns bombarding the
Democratic Government in the Winter Palace
sounded over the city, the delegates to the All
Russian Congress of Soviets, led by Trotzky,
shouted down those who protested against civil
war ; as the protesters left the Congress, Trotzky
cried : ' Let them go. They are refuse that will
be swept into the garbage heaps of history.' The
Congress remained in the hands of the Bolshevists,
and as the night wore on, news poured into the
Smolny of the arrest of the members of the
Government ; of the seizure of the State Bank,
and also of the telegraph and telephone stations ;
and of the capture of the staff headquarters. The
whole structure of government was falling under
the hammer strokes of the insurgents. A mud-
bespattered Commissioner mounted the Congress
platform to announce his message : ' The garrison
'ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, 15
of Tsarskoyeselo declares for the Soviets.' Another
message came in: 'The Cyclists' Battalion is for
the Soviets ; not a single man is found willing to
shed the blood of his brothers.' Krylenko mounted
the tribune, a telegram in his hand : ' Greetings
to the Soviet from the XII Army. The Soldiers'
Soviet is taking over the command of the Northern
Front.' Throughout the night Lenin remained
in his room at the Smolny. The room had hardly
any furniture. Someone spread rugs on the
floor, and laid two cushions on them. ' Vladimir
Ilyich and I lay down to rest,' writes Trotzky,
' but in a few minutes I was called, " Dan
1
is
speaking, you must reply." When I came back
again I lay down near Vladimir Ilyich. Every
five or ten minutes someone came running to
inform us what was going on there. In addition,
messages came from the city where the siege of
the Winter Palace was going on.'
2
At last, towards
dawn, the session of the Congress of the All Russian
'Soviets ended with the historic declaration :
'The Provisional Government is deposed.
Based upon the will of the great majority of
'vorkers, soldiers, and peasants, the Congress of
Soviets assumes power. The Soviet Authority
will at once propose an immediate democratic
peace to all nations, an immediate truce upon ali
points. It will assure the free transfer of lands
from the landlords.'
1
Dan was the leader of the Moderates in the Soviet Congress,
2
Trotzky, Lenin, p. 126.
The work of the German diplomats who had
despatched Lenin and his comrades in the sealed
train to Petrograd was accomplished ; the Russian
army was put out of action.
A few hours earlier the news had arrived of the
capture of the Winter Palace, and of the removal
of the Democratic Government, sheltering therein,
to the Petropaul fortress. When morning came,
' Vladimir Ilyich looked tired,' writes Trotzky.
' He smiled and said, " the transition from the
state of illegality, being driven in every direction,
to power, is too rough." Then he added, in
German, '' It makes me dizzy,'' and made the
sign of the cross before his face. After tl1is he went
about the tasks of the day.'
The first task of Lenin's new day was the
breaking up of that democratic Constituent As-
sembly, towards which the hopes of the unhappy
Russian people had turned for two generations.
Fully aware of these hopes Lenin had roused the
people to seize ' all power for the Soviets,' on the
treacherous plea that the Soviets were the only
means by which the Constituent Assembly could
be convoked. The Soviet power was duly seized,
on the night of November 7 At once Lenin
threw down his scaling ladders, remarking,
' Naturally we must break up the Constituent
Assembly.' The people, who were still intent on
their long-desired national parliament, were pre-
pared for Lenin's volte-face by an article in
' ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS ' 17
Pravda, which was issued on November 8, on the
day following the destruction of the Provisional
Government ; for the hammer blows of Lenin
always fell swiftly. This article admitted that a
Constituent Assembly did indeed represent the
highest form of democracy ; but went on to
declare that the Soviets represented a still higher
idea of government; and announced, further, that
they were the only possible form, during the
transition from a bourgeois State to Socialism.
1
Here we have the authentic Leninist touch, the
hand of the man who always kept close to reality.
Policy, in action, followed rapidly on propa-
ganda. The Constituent Assembly, admittedly
the 'highest form of democracy,' was duly con-
voked for January 18, 1918. The delegates
gathered from all parts of Russia, not without
apprehension of Bolshevik intentions. ' In the
nature of things,' writes Trotzky, betraying a fine
scorn of the people, ' these little citizens from the
provinces did not know at all what they should do.
The greater part were simply afraid. But they
careftilly prepared the ritual for the first meeting.
They brought candles with them, in case the
Bolsheviki should cut off the electric light ; and a
vast nutnber of sandwiches, in case their food
should be taken from them. Thus democracy
entered into the struggle with dictatorship, heavily
armed with sandwiches and candles.'
2
The first session of the doomed Assembly had
l Pravda, November 8, 1917.
2
hardly opened when the delegates were asked to
confirm the Soviets in power, as the new rulers of
Russia; and to ratify all the decrees, promulgated
since the imprisonment of the Democratic Provi-
sional Government. These arbitrary demands
were flatly refused ; and the delegates then
settled down, as they conceived, to business.
Their discussions were prolonged far into the
night. As morning approached the doors were
flung open, a squad of sailors of the Red Fleet
marched into the hall, and the selected represen-
tatives of the Russian nation were summarily
ejected. Lenin's own words are the fittest record
of this achievement : ' The breaking up of the
Constituent Assembly, by the Soviet Power, is
the complete and public liquidation of formal
democracy.'
1
To Trotzky, also, it seemed that the
young Russian democracy was already over-
thrown : ' A small and miserable demonstration of
the rearguard of '' democracy '' departed from the
scene, armed with candles and sandwiches.
Finis!'
Certainly the gates of Russian democracy had
been broken down ; and not only by force of
reasoning. The arguments of Lenin, at this
critical moment, as Trotzky observes,' went hand
in hand ' with the transfer to Petrograd of a
Lettish regiment on which the Dictator knew that
he could rely. Many of the delegates had come
from the vast rural areas of Russia. 'The
1
Trotsky, Lenin, p. rso.
peasant may hesitate in this case,' Lenin said.
' Proletarian decision is necessary here.' Pro-
letarian propaganda translated into action at the
point of Lettish bayonets had every chance of
success-so long as the bayonets remained
pointed at a people armed only with sandwiches
and candles. Trotzky sums up the events of the
night of January 18 in one trenchant sentence:
' The further victorious development of the pro-
letarian revolution, after the simple, open, brutal
breaking-up of the Constituent Assembly, dealt
formal democracy a finishing stroke, from which
it never recovered.'
CHAPTER II
SOVIETS AND COMMISSARS
'Liberty is a bourgeois superstition.'-LENIN.
0
N the night of November 7, 1917, the
Democratic Provisional Government of
Russia fell, to the sound of the guns of
the Red Fleet. On the night of January 18, 1918,
the still more democratic Constituent Assembly of
Russia, which had been elected on a basis of man-
hood suffrage, was dispersed by sailors of the same
Fleet. Ten days later, democracy being now
'liquidated,' the Third All Russian Congress of
Soviets announced that all legislative and ad-
ministrative powers had been taken over by the
Soviets. 'All power' had, in reality, been taken
over by a Council of eighteen Commissars.
These three events may be looked upon as
three connected assaults, prepared and co-ordin-
ated with faultless tactical skill, for the destruction
of that young Russian democracy, which had
hardly, as yet, outgrown the bonds of Tsardom.
It is significant that the first assault, that made on
the Provisional Government, was preceded by a
a r ~ a g e of pr?p;ganda, the results of which amply
JUstified Lemn s remark that, although his party
had been laughed at when they ' proposed to
control guns with leaflets, the event had proved
20
the leaflets to be quite as powerful.'
1
The
fusillade of Soviet propaganda had, indeed, begun
as early as 1915, when Lenin announced that
' The Soviets of Workers' Deputies must be re-
garded as organs of revolt, and of revolutionary
administration.'
2
Lenin sounded the same note,
so alluring to a people hungry for freedom, again,
eighteen months later, from his refuge in Zurich:
' The Russian people shall win freedom, and shall
transfer political power entirely into the hands of
the Soviets of Workers and Peasants.'
3
Finally,
in September 1917, theory and propaganda were
allied to policy, and were thus made concrete.
The assertion, irresistible to the Russian people in
that year, was everywhere proclaimed that the
capture of ' all power ' by the Soviets would
ensure the convocation of the popular idol, the
Constituent Assembly ; and the four slogans
appealing to the four greatest needs at that moment
of the Russian people were appropriated by the
Bolshevik party :-Peace, Food, Land, Liberty.
It was on the Soviets, as the immediate means of
convoking the Constituent Assembly, that the
workers and peasants of Russia had been induced
to stake all their hopes of the conclusion of an
unpopular and disastrous war, of the easing of the
food shortage, and of the sating of their land
hunger and of political freedom. Deluded by this
1 Lenin, Interview with Mr. Bertrand Russell, Theory and
Practice of Bolshevism, p. zr. Russell.
2
Lenin, No. 47 of the Geneva Social Democrat, October 1915.
Lenin, How to obtain Peace, March 1917.
slogan of' All power to the Soviets,' the people of
Petrograd rose, as we have seen, on the night of
November 7, and destroyed their own Democratic
Provisional Government. But their long-desired
Constituent Assembly tarried, still unborn. What
happened in the interval ?
The events of that dramatic moment, a moment
on which depended more than the immediate fate
of the Russian people, have been recorded by one
of the chief actors in the drama, Trotzky : ' From
the moment that the Provisional Government was
overthrown Lenin officiated as the Government, in
large things as well as small. We had as yet no
apparatus ; connexion with the country was
lacking ; the employers were on strike ; telephone
connexion with Moscow was cut ; we had neither
money, nor an army. But Lenin took hold of
absolutely everything, by means of statutes,
decrees, and commands, in the name of the
Government.'
1
The whole State machine had
been smashed, as the Bolshevik leader meant it to
be smashed. The Government offices were
deserted. Ministers were in the prison of Peter
and Paul-that Bastille of Russian liberty, the
cells of which are below the level of the waters of
the Neva. Many of the officers of the army had
been massacred. Among the rank and file,
propaganda had done work more deadly than that
of the revolvers of the assassins. All the threads
of government, all the apparatus of administration
1
Trotzky, Lenin, pp. 161 sqq.
had to be created by revolutionary improvisations.
Trotzky shows us the manner of their creation :
' " What name shall we use ? " Lenin considered,
aloud," Not Ministers-that is a repulsive, worn-
out designation." "We might say Commissars,"
I suggested, " What about ' People's Com-
missars ?-Councils of People's Commissars? '"
" Councils of People's Commissars," Lenin
repeated, " That is splendid. That smells of
Revolution." '1
So, from the still-smoking ruins of the existing
world in Russia,-' the Russian smash at the end
of 1917 was certainly the completest that has ever
happened to any modern social organisation,'
2
-
there rose up, not the promised power of the
Soviets of Workers and Peasants, but Councils of
People's Commissars, created by the Dictatorship,
or to be more historically accurate by the Dictator,
of the Proletariat. It is not easy for an English-
man born and bred under a free democracy,
which he has inherited from generations of sturdy
ancestors, to realize either the political conditions
of the old Russia, or the extent of the ruin wrought
in the winter of 1917. 'Art, literature, science,'
writes that distinguished Socialist Mr. H. G.
Wells, 'all the refinements and elaborations of
life, all that we mean by " civilization," were
involved in that torrential catastrophe.' Every-
thing had to be built up, from the beginning.-
' We could not offer precedents,' says Trotzky,
1
Ibid.
2
H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows, p. 33
'for history knew of none.' And, in the midst of
that universal chaos, Lenin, as President of the
Council of Commissars, sat daily, for five and six
hours at a stretch, leading, controlling, dominating.
From his Council room in the Smolny Institute, at
Petrograd, decrees began instantly to issue,-the
new orders for a new world of human relation.:.
ships. The volumes of ' Soviet' Decrees form,
indeed, a by no means unimportant part of the
collected works of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Even
the People's Commissars were, when necessary,
sharply brought to heel by their master. One of
the members, Kameneff, had ventured to repeal
the military death penalty. Lenin's anger flared
out. 'How can we accomplish a revolution with-
out shooting? ' he cried. Like measure was meted
out to certain unfriendly critics in the Russian
Press. 'Shall we not tame this pack?' exclaimed
Lenin. 'For God's sake what kind of a dictator-
ship is this?' That was the language of the
Council room. In the streets the people were told
that the decrees of the Commissars were merely
temporary measures pending the convening, in the
name of the Soviet, of their Constituent Assembly.
The real power of the Soviets had, of course,
been effectively mined by the creation of the
Council of Commissars. The mine was not,
however, immediately exploded. The authority of
the Soviets, on which the people of Russia so
tragically relied, was needed for the destruction
of the Constituent Assembly. This final act of
25
demolition was a task the immediate necessity of
which Lenin had never, for a moment, doubted;
and on the morning of January 19, Russia woke up
to find herself a ' Soviet Republic,' administered
by eighteen Commissars. Within a few months
the people of Russia were to discover, in the
Soviet system, the most perfect political smoke
screen ever devised by the brain of man. It is true
that this elaborate system, with its occupational
constituencies, its ' right of recall ' of delegates, its
intricate chain of elections, appeared to be more
closely linked up with the ' toiling majority of the
people ' than any previous method of representa-
tion. The village and factory Soviets were to be
elected by the peasants and workers, all employers
and other capitalists and all the clergy being dis-
franchised. These Soviets elected, in their turn,
local and district Soviet Congresses. These,
again, selected the All Russian Soviet Congress,
which body finally elected an Executive Committee
ordained to sit in perpetual session and to control
the People's Commissars. The entire conception
was hailed as a ' real addition to existing political
ideas ' ; as ' an important international pheno-
menon.' It was frequently described by Lenin as
the most perfect organ for ascertaining and
registering the will of the people. For the first
time, in the history of the world, it seemed as
though naught hindered but that the will of the
people should prevail. What did, in fact, prevail
was the will of Lenin.
c
Is it possible that Lenin, with his genius for
political reality, was unaware of the fact that the
. o i t , ver si11ce tl1eir political debut in Russia,
l1ad sl1o 11 tl1e1ns lves to be incapable of ruling ?
Had tl1e tnaster mechanician of revolution created
the Soviets as an instrument for the seizure, but not
for the retention, of power ? From their origin the
Soviets had made no effort to assume the ruling
power. In the spring of 1917, when Lenin first
launched the idea that the Soviets might be the
embryo of a new State organization, they were
themselves repudiating any such activities. They
refused to form a Ministry when invited to do so
by the Provisional Government. The Soviets at
their early meetings, says Demianov, 'made
absolutely no pretension to the role of the State
ruling power. '
1
Assumption of such power ' was
quite contrary to their intention.' Mr. Michael
Farbman, who applauds the Bolshevik ' spirit of
limitless daring,' and who considers Bolshevism
to be' the road of destiny,' is quite frank about the
results of the ceaseless propaganda of ' All power
to tl1e Soviets.' He says : 'the power, which was
seized in the name of the Soviets, was now vested
solely in the Communist Party. The Soviets in
whose name the country was governed reigned,
but never ruled.
2
It is Zinovieff, the friend and
colleague of Lenin, from the days when both were
hunted revolutionaries, who has told us that ' In
Lenin's view the Soviets were organizations for
1 Demianov, Archives of the Russian Revolution.
'2 Ivl. Farbman, Bolshevism in Retreat.
SOVIETS AND COM1\1:ISSARS 27
the seizure of State power.'
1
Zinovieff adds, it is
true, that Lenin desired that the Soviets should
enable the workers to become the ruling class. If
this were so, it was a desire which, during five
years of supreme power, the Dictator allowed to
remain unfulfilled.
This gigantic fable of the Soviet power, of the
Soviet Government of Russia, created by Lenin,
still lives ; and it is still used by the present rulers
of Russia, the successors of Lenin, in all their
international propaganda, to win the support of
that democracy which they privately glory in
having destroyed. Caught by the glamour of the
phrase ' The Workers' and Peasants' Republic'
many workers in England and in other countries,
to-day, march in procession to the rhythmical
shout of ' The Soviets ! the Soviets ! ' It were
well if they took to heart the warning of Maxim
Gorki ' We have been starving for freedom. We
may very easily devour our freedom.' It is in the
11ame of the Soviets that the freedom of Russia has
been devoured. It is in the name of the Soviets
that the gates of Russian democracy have been
forced, and that the arbitrary dictatorship of a
group of international Commissars has been
installed within the walls of the Kremlin. It is
in the name of the Soviets that this international
dictatorship retains its power to-day.
It is also in the name of the Soviets, and in
1
Zinovieff, Nicolai Lenin, p. 24.
unity with the ' Soviet ' Government of Russia,
that workers throughout the worl<.i are being en-
couraged to plunge into a universal' class war,' in
order that all countries may achieve the Russian
results. In the interests of democracy, therefore,
a summary of these results has become essential.
That ardent Communist, Mr. Bertrand Russell,
indeed goes further, and declares such an in-
vestigation to be imperative ' in the interests of
civilization.' Mr. Russell's account of his visit to
Russia in 1920, after the' Soviet 'system had been
in unfettered operation for two years, is a historical
document of exceptional value. He points out that
' advanced Socialists ' are apt to think that ' pro-
letariat ' in Russia means proletariat, but tl1at
' dictatorship ' does not quite mean dictatorship.
' This,' he tells us, ' is the opposite of the truth.
When a Russian Communist speaks of dictator-
ship he means the word literally ; but when he
speaks of the proletariat he means the word in a
pickwickian sense.' Mr. Russell proceeds : ' When
I went to Russia I imagined that I was going to see
an interesting experiment in a new form of repre-
sentative government. I did see an interesting
experiment, but not in representative government.'
Election to the Soviets being by a show of hands,
it followed that any opponents of the frankly
terrorist Government ' do you think that we can
be victors ~ w i t o u t the most severe revolutionary
terror?' Lenin had said,
1
were marked men.
1
Further, no candidate for election, except a
Communist, could get any printing done, all
printing works having been nationalized. No
candidate except a Communist could make use of
the Press, all newspapers having been nationalized.
No candidate other than a Communist could
address any indoor meetings, all public halls
having been nationalized. And if such a candidate
had, by superhuman tenacity, succeeded in being
elected to a District or Central Soviet, he would be
unable to serve thereon, as a railway pass would
be denied him all railways having been national-
ized.1 These, it may be observed by the way, are
some interesting practical results of the national-
ization of necessary public services.
The colossal fiction of government by the
Soviets was not supported only by force. It was
hardly possible even for a Lenin violently to
enforce his will on a hundred million human
beings, spread over one-sixth of the habitable
globe. Compulsion was reinforced by the con-
stant reiteration of seductive phrases, placarded
at every street corner, instilled at countless
meetings, announced from cinemas, declaimed
from platforms, filling the newspapers, broad-
casted by wireless,
2
decorating the very railway
carriages. When Trotzky as Minister of War
visited Ekaterinburg, in order to assist the
1
Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism,
pp. 72 seq.
,a It has been pointed out that, owing to its flatness, Russia is
an ideal country for wireless.
work of turning regiments of the Red Army
into conscripts of Labour, his train was
covered with advertisements of Bolshevism and
incitements to class hatred. These methods have
been well described as ' the most extraordinary
apparatus of propaganda the world has ever seen.'
The people of Russia, and also the peoples of
Europe and of the East, were told that the Soviets
existed to ' suppress all exploitation of man by
man.' The' Soviet Republic' was affirmed to be
a' free alliance of free nations.' Declarations were
made with sublime effrontery of the suppression of
'State coercion.' Guarantees, in the name of the
Soviet Government, were announced of freedom
for religious propaganda, freedom of the Press, and
freedom for meetings. Decrees in the name of the
Soviet Government were posted up in all public
institutions, schools, stations,a11d colleges,and were
published in all local papers. These decrees gave
all land to tl1e peasants ; abolished private owner-
ship ; gave the control of industry to the workers ;
and ordered the disarming of the propertied
classes, and the arming of the workers.
1
Every-
where the people were told that all authority was
vested in the Soviets, that is, in themselves.
Again it was proved that propaganda is more
effective than rifles.
Finally it was announced that the Central
Executive Committee, in the election of which
1
Declaration of the. All Russian of Soviets, January
1918 ; . and the Constitution o.f the Sovtet Republic promul-
gated tn July Igi8, and pubhshed tn England in 1919.
the poorest workman and peasant had taken part,
was given supreme power, even over the eighteen
ruling People's Commissars. What more perfect
safeguard for the liberties of the people could be
devised ? The :flaw in the arrangement was that
the same individuals sat on the Council of
Eighteen Commissars and on the controlling
Central Executive Committee. Lenin, Kameneff,
Rykoff, and their colleagt1es, sitting as People's
Commissars, were controlled by Rykoff, Kameneff,
Lenin, and their colleagues, sitting as members of
the supreme Executive Committee.
1
The follow-
ing lists are conclusive on this point.
Central Executive Committee
The People' s in Control of the People' s
Commissars. Commissars.
1923. 1923.
Lenin Lenin
Kameneff Kameneff
Rykoff Rykoff
Tsiurupa Tsiurupa
Smirnov Smirnov
Vladimirov Vladimirov

Yakovenko Yakovenko
Belodorodov Belodorodov
Kiselev l{iselev
Lunarcharsky Lunarcharsky
Bogdanov Bogdanov
Semashko Semashko
It is by Lenin himself, chief architect of the
edifice of the ' Soviet ' Constitution, and of the
substructure of propaganda and terrorism upon
which it rests, that the results of his own and his
colleagues' labours in those early months of 1918
1
I zvestia, December 28, 1922, and July 8, 1923.

are best summed up : ' Just as a hundred and
fifty thousand landowners, under Tsarism, domin-
ated one hundred and thirty million peasants, so
two hundred thousand members of the Bolshevik
party are imposing their proletarian will on the
masses.'
1
Certainly it is difficult for the English workers,
when constantly assailed by reports of the happy
of their Russian comrades, to realize that
this freedom lasted only for a few months during
1917, before the advent of the Soviet Government
and has not since been recovered. In March 1917
it was indeed possible for the democrats of the
world to rejoice with Russia. ' During the first
days of the Revolution people all over Russia
seemed so very happy and content. I shall always
remember genial smile on the face of every
man I met m Petrograd or elsewhere at that time.
All were sure that at last their day of happiness
had arrived,' wrote a Petrograd professor. A
year .later, in March 1918, the day of Russian
happmess seemed to have set for ever. Here is a
page the political life of a Russian village,
m the summer of that year, in which the
basis of the so-called ' Soviet ' Government is
unveiled. An election to the local Soviet was due
to place in the village of Karagi, in the
provmce of Perm. Speeches were delivered on
the village green, calling upon every free citizen
of the 'Russian Federated Social Republic' to
1
Lenin, April 1918.
exercise his or her new privilege of voting. A
machine gun was set up, upon a bit of rising ground
near by ; and a line of soldiers of the Red Army
was formed up across the village green. The
villagers were told that to step to the hither side of
the line was to vote for the Government, and that
to step to the further side was to vote against the
Government. Two peasants promptly moved to
the further side of the line, saying that they would
not vote for those who denied them the right of
expressing their opinions. At this a halt was
called, and these two men were at once arrested as
enemies of the people, and were shot. Their still
quivering bodies were hastily tumbled into a
shallow hole ; and then ' voting for the Soviet '
was resumed, with the result that the whole popu-
lation of the village recorded a unanimous vote for
the Government candidate. This result was duly
made known in the columns of the provincial
Press, and also at Petrograd.
It will be objected that this was an isolated
incident. Two months later, in the province of
Kazan, the Congress of the Soviet of the Peasants
was dissolved because its 'state of mind was
antagonistic to the Government.'
1
In places where
no ' Soviet ' as yet existed the Government would
send a group of Communists under a guard of Red
soldiers, to form the Executive Committee of the
non-existent electoral body. In one village where
the peasant electors ventured a protest, twenty-one
l Pravda, August 6, rgr8.
34
were shot, including the girl telegraph operator.
Again, it may be objected that these were violent
moments, mere accidentals of the first year of
'reconstruction.' A year later the officials of the
province of Vladimir hastened to obey the
following order : ' the names given below ' a
list of Government Communist candidates fol-
lowed ' must be elected. The non-fulfilment of
this order will result in those responsible being
severely punished. '
1
Yet another year later, and
the Government, now firmly seated in the saddle,
- there were moments in 1918 when Lenin ad-
mitted ' to-day we are only holding fast to the
mane,' published a decree openly prohibiting the
election of any candidate other than a member of
the Communist (Government) Party.
2
In the
following year the districts of Tula, Briansk,
Besitza, and Y aroslav witnessed the dissolution
'
by the Government, of entire Soviets, because
the elected delegates were not members of the
Government Party. In the same year, 1921, when
the time came for the election of delegates to the
Petrograd Soviet, the Government secret police
arrested all the Social Democrats upon whom they
could lay their hands.
3
It is not surprising to
read that the Soviet elections, which were
frequent in 1918, had become, in 1920, very rare.
This clearly is a record of three years of con-
secutive policy, a policy of deliberate suppression
1
The Diel N aroda, March 22, 1919.
2
I zvestia, July 15, 1 9 20.
8
Socialisticheski Viestnik, December 2, 1921.
of the essential rights of democracy. It was a
policy which called forth the spirited protest of
Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Mr. A. Henderson
and their colleagues, at the Labour Congress of
May 1923, a protest formulated in the of a
demand to the Soviet Government, ' wh1ch calls
itself a Workers' Government,' to abandon 'the
system of terroristic party dictatorship, and
adopt a regime of political freedom and democratic
self-government of the people.' '_fhe of
the year 192 5 is even more conclusive evidence of
the total suppression of electoral liberty among a
people that only ten years ago had attained to the
possession of manhood suffrage. of
that year a decree was signed by
of the Union of Soviet and Soctal1st Republ1cs, as
the present Commissar still calls
itself instructing all the Repubhcs under the
U to cancel all elections of candidates of whom
the Government authorities did not approve ; to
cause new Soviets to be ' elected,' under strict
control ; and further, to quash these re-elections,
should they still prove to be unsatisfactory. .
Lenin had promised to the unhappy Russian
people that they should . ' freedom, and
transfer political power entirely the hands of
the Soviet.' The transfer of pol1t1cal power was
indeed complete ; but it was through the impotent
hands of the Soviets, who had always shown
selves incapable of holding power, into the Iron
grip of the Communist Commissar Government.
In this process the freedom, so tragically enjoyed
?Y Russia during the few months of 1917, has,
tndeed, been entirely devoured. A member of
the English Labour Party has summed up both
Russia's loss, and Russia's present enslavement :
' We rejoiced when universal adult suffrage was
bestowed upon the Russian people by the Kerensky
(Provisional) Government. The present Russian
Government has ruthlessly destroyed the popular
franchise, and set in its place a brutal autocracy,
that has waded through blood, murder and
disease. '
1
'
With the destruction of the Provisional Govern-
ment, the further destruction of the Constituent
Assembly, and the erection of the impotent
Soviets as a mask for the autocracy of the eighteen
ruling Commissars, guided by the master-hand of
Lenin, Russia lay stripped and bleeding, and ready
for the application, forthwith, of the pure doctrine
of Communism.
It may be protested that a record of results
strays from the allotted path, when diverging, for
the space of two chapters, into historical narrative.
As well might a record of the Pyramids omit
to mention the Pharaohs. It may be added that
the racial characteristic of the Soviet pyramid
is that, for eleven years, aided by dexterous
juggling, it has remained balanced upon its point.
And that point is Lenin.
1
Mr. J. Maxton, M.P.
CHAPTER III
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION
'I have given my heart to the Russian people, my soul to God.'
Speech, before his execution, by the
Metropolitan Bishop of Petro grad, I 92 3.
- ...... HE ' sunniest of revolutions ' with its
Democratic Provisional Government had
brought to the Russian people, for the
brief space of six months, something even better
than political freedom. The Provisional Govern-
ment proclaimed, in May 1917, complete liberty of
conscience throughout Russia. The Orthodox
Russian Church obtained independence of State
control, and sought reorganization under a prelate
for whom was revived the ancient title of Patriarch.
The Catholic Church, freed from hostile State
interference, carried forward the apostolate of the
Faith, under Archbishop Cieplak. Freedom of
action was given to sects such as the Baptists and
the Methodists, no less than to the strange cults
in which Russia has always been prolific.
Those summer months of I 9 I 7, so full of hope
for the Russian people, passed into an autumn of
gathering storm clouds, presaging the tornado that
was to destroy all things in its track. The storm,
as we have seen, broke in November. By the
spring of 1918 few characteristics of civilized life
remained in the vast area extending from the shores
37

of the Baltic to the Black Sea. The administra-
tion in the name of the People's Commissars was
firmly established. Personal liberty had vanished.
No man or woman knew, when they left their
home in the morning, whether they would return
to it in the evening. The elementary needs of
physical life, food, clothing, firing, were dis-
appearing; and a food dictatorship was in control.I
Means of communication, whether by road, rail,
letter, or telegram, were precarious. Disease was
rife. The living were becoming accustomed to the
not infrequent sight of the unburied dead. One
thing, alone, remained stable, in universal chaos.
The new Government of Russia was indeed im-
bued with the intention of carrying through ' the
most ardent propaganda against religion.'
2
But,
as yet, the open practice of Christianity in the land
so long known to the world as ' holy Russia ' was
permitted. The Orthodox clergy continued their
ministrations. Wherever a Catholic church or
chapel stood, there the priest remained, bringing
the sacraments to his people and saying the daily
Mass as calmly as if the fierce tides of revolution
were not roaring and swirling round his church.
The respite was one of tactics, not of indiffer-
ence. The Council of People's Commissars, con-
trolled by Lenin, even the Petrograd Soviet
controlled by Zinovieff, were merely waiting,
1
Decree of May 13, 1918.
2
. The ABC of Communism. An official publication of the
Soviet Government. Moscow, 1919. Par. 91 : 'The Soviet power
must exert the most fervent propaganda against religion.'
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION 39
nervous of explosions of popular anger, should
religion be openly attacked. But this period
of waiting did not in any way imply the least
divergence from the axiom of the Soviet Govern-
ment, ' Religion and Communism are incom-
patible, both theoretically and practically .'
1
The
interval was brought to an end as soon as the
people of Russia had been sufficiently terrorized by
that administrative machine, the name of which has
become ominously familiar throughout the world,
the Cheka. The Cheka, now known as the Ogpu,,
is an Extraordinary Commission, instituted in
accordance with Lenin's conviction of the 'absolute
necessity of terror .'
2
Lenin did not hesitate to
make brutal and public affirmation of this con-
viction. In a speech delivered in 1920 before the
Third International he declared quite simply and
openly, ' the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is
unthinkable without terror.'
3
The headquarters
of this Extraordinary Commission are at Moscow ;
and the organization was controlled, until his
death in 1926, by one of the principal Ministers of
the Soviet Government, Dzerjinsky. During the
first five years of Dzerjinsky's administration of the
Cheka the total number of executions carried
out, throughout Russia, by his agents, was "
I ,7oo,ooo persons; and, in innumerable cases,
torture had been applied. Branch Chekas are
1
Bukharin, Pravda, April 1923.
2
Lenin's speech at a sitting of the Third International, Moscow,
July 30, 1920.
established in all towns, and even in villages,
and have plenary powers. Thus at Kiev two
hundred executions took place daily in January
1919, 124 victims being killed in one night in
the cellars of the office of the Cheka in
Sadowa Street. Up to September 1919 the
Petrograd Cheka had executed I ,soo persons ;
and it is of interest to record that only some 140
out of the 400 Petrograd delegates of the demo-
cratic Constituent Assembly were left alive. In
December 1919 the executions of the Moscow
Cheka averaged 30 per night. As Mr. Bertrand
Russell frankly states, the Chekas had power to
imprison any man or woman without trial ; and
had spies everywhere. In 1919 the whole popula-
tion was under fear of denunciation and of a
horrible death. In 1920 a member of the Labour
Party Delegation then visiting Russia, Dr. Haden
Guest, said ' the atmosphere of Russia at the
present time is one of terror.' During the autumn
of 1920 s,ooo persons were shot in Petrograd. In
1921 the prisons in Petrograd were, presumably,
becoming overcrowded, so the Soviet Government
took 6oo prisoners, despatched them to Kronstadt,
loaded them on to barges, and then sank them.
These are a few illustrations of the basic means of
Soviet government. They can be multiplied
a thousand-fold, from the evidence of Soviet
records.
1
It was this atmosphere, an atmosphere achieved
1 See infra, Chapter V, The Soviet Government and Liberty. '
by the ruthless application of the Red Terror, as
Dzerjinsky himself called his Department, which
enabled the Soviet Government to prosecute
freely its policy of religious persecution. Within
twelve months the conditions created in Russia
were those of the Roman Empire under Nero and
Diocletian. In two years, from 1918 to 1920, 26
Archbishops and Bishops of the Orthodox Russian
Church and 6,775 priests were massacred. The
Archbishop of Perm was buried alive, after having
had his eyes put out and his face slashed. The
Archbishop of Tobolsk was drowned, after endur-
ing two months of penal servitude. The Bishop of
Belgarod was subjected to horrible mockery, and
then plunged into quicklime. The Bishop of
Y ouriew was thrown into a basement with other
prisoners : there his nose and ears were cut off, he
was struck many times with a bayonet, and finally
cut to pieces ; the Archbishop of Varoneje was
hung before the altar of the Church of the
Monastery of S. Mitrofane. In the government of
Varoneje 160 priests were shot. In the govern-
ment of Cherson three priests won the glorious
privilege of sharing the sentence of Christ, and
were crucified. A priest at Tcherdin was stripped
of his clothing, in the Russian winter, and was
then sprinkled with cold water, until he became a
statue of ice. In the single diocese of Harkov
seventy priests were put to death. The Archi-
mandrite Ornatsky was shot, with his two sons.
The Soviet Government officials asked him,
D
-
42
' Which shall be shot first, you or your sons ? '
He answered, ' My sons.' While they were being
shot Ornatsky knelt, reading the prayers for the
dying. A platoon of the Red Army soldiers
refused to fire ; a second squad also refused ;
finally a Soviet Commissar stepped forward and
killed him. Archbishop Feofan, who was known
for the sanctity of his life, was brought to a dying
condition, and then thrown into a hole in the ice
of a frozen river and drowned. A group of
sailors of the Red Fleet, watching a religious
procession, said, 'We would kill all these clergy;
but we do not want to soil our hands with the
blood of such vermin as Christ's priests.'
1
The
number of priests massacred by agents of the
Soviet Government in 1920 was 1,275. It is
difficult for men and women living outside Russia
to realize that these things were happening less than
ten years ago. It is difficult for English men and
women to realize that they happened under the
direction of a so-called Government which
England had officially recognized, and the repre-
sentative of which has been permitted to occupy
the Russian Embassy in London.
Two years later, in 1922, fifty-four priests and
deacons, together with some members of the laity
of the Orthodox Church, were put on trial in
Petrograd; eleven were condemned to death, and
five were executed. Death sentences on Christians
1 R. Courtier-Foster in the Times of December 9, 1919, cor-
roborated in a written reply by Mr. Bonar Law of December II,
1919. Also Maltre Aubert of the Geneva Bar.
were also given at Novgorod, Novocherkask, and
Shouya. Men and women were shot down when
attempting to defend the churches from desecra-
tion. In Moscow there were wholesale arrests of
priests of the Orthodox Church. Further, in
February of this year, a decree was launched for
the confiscation of all Church property, including
altar vessels. The plea put forward by the
Government was that of the famine ; and the
Churches responded by putting their possessions
freely at the disposal of the famine relief funds,
with the single reservation of the altar vessels
needed for public worship. Agents of the Cheka,
however, insisted on wholesale sacrilege, with the
result of deep popular resentment and rioting,
speedily repressed by the bayonets of the Red
Army. The fact that the Government treasury, in
the Kremlin, contained jewels valued, by an
American expert, at one billion gold roubles,
disposes of the Government assertion that the
decree of confiscation was necessary to meet the
needs of the famine ; as does the further fact that
altar vessels of no value were wantonly broken up.
In December of this year a Government circular
was issued authorizing the use of all churches in
Russia for lectures, concerts, balls, and theatrical
representations.
1
Soldiers of the Red Army were
employed to drive the congregations out of the
churches which had been closed, and did their
work with great brutality. In the persecutions
1
Circular of the Soviet Government 200, Par. x. December 1921.
44
under the Roman emperors those Christians who
were maltreated, but not killed, bore the name of
floridi, or rubri, the 'crimson witnesses.' There
were many Christian floridi in Russia in 1922.
1
Following on the onslaught on the Orthodox
Church came the attack on the Catholics. The
Catholic priests were thrown into prison ; and the
laity were cruelly persecuted even when, as in
Petrograd, the majority were working men and
women. Twelve months later the civilized world
was horrified with the news of the trial of the
Catholic Archbishop of Petrograd, Monsignor
Cieplak, together with seventeen priests, followed
by death sentences on the Archbishop and on
Monsignor Budkievicz. The wild passions of
revolutionary violence might be pleaded in excuse
of the massacres of 1918; no such plea could be
put forward on behalf of the considered action of
the Soviet Government of 1923.
The proceedings opened by the sudden transfer
on the night of March 2 of all the accused from
Petrograd to Moscow. The square in front of the
Nicolas station, at Petrograd, was filled with
working men and women, many of whom were in
tears, and who all knelt, as the train moved out, to
1
The efforts of the Soviet authorities, never lacking in subtlety,
to ' Sovietize ' the Orthodox Church have met with so little success
that the so-called ' Living' or ' Reformed' Church needs only a
passing mention. Some renegade Orthodox clergy were induced to
attempt the establishment of a hierarchy abjectly dependent on an
atheist government. This paradox did little credit to their faith
or their reason. The latest effort of the Government appears t o
have been the imprisonment and subsequent submission of the
unhappy Metropolitan Sergius, who is reported to have bartered his
Church to the Soviets in a pact drawn up in August 1927.
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION
45
receive the last blessing of their Archbishop. On
arrival at Moscow the Archbishop and the priests
were conveyed through the streets in an open
lorry. The trial began on March 21, and was
elaborately staged for 'Red' effects. The Court
sat in the Hall of the Red Trade Unions. The
judges included two Ministers of the Soviet
Government and the case for the Soviet Govern-
ment was led by the Public Prosecutor, Krylenko.
An eye-witness has placed on record a vivid picture
of the procedure ; and of the sharply defined
contrast, in demeanour, of the uneasy and slovenly
Soviet officials, and the cultivated and serene
group of priests who stood facing torture and
death not only with suavity, but with a radiant
confidence. These were men whoknewthemselves
to be, as Archbishop Cieplak reminded Krylenko,
the guardians of ' that divine truth, which now for
near two thousand years has been the light of the
world.' One of the prisoners, Father Edward
Yunevich, a White Russian, twenty-nine years
old, was known among the children of his parish as
the ' angel priest.' The smile that won him that
title was on his face through all the brutalities of
the trial. Repeatedly the prisoners gave answers
in a tone' so bold and joyous that the Red Judges
looked up in surprise.' Their surprise would have
been less had they known enough of Roman
history to be acquainted with the divine energy of
the Christian martyrs of the Roman world who,
glad and fearless,' gave their bodies for God's sake
~ ~ ~ _ _ _ j
to death.' A young layman, a Lithuanian lad, was
included in the charge. His face, we read, was
lighted up by a ' glow of supernatural fire ' ; his
head was thrown back, and ' his bright eyes
seemed fixed, not on anything in that Red Court,
but on some celestial vision beyond.' It was this
boy who answered the presiding judge, when
questioned why he had not left a certain church
when the Red soldiers were driving out the people :
' When I saw that it was dangerous to stay in the
church, I remained, with the other Christians, so
as to give a good example ; and we all knelt down
and sang prayers.' This record is almost in the
same words as that of an eye-witness of the
persecutions under Nero: 'The Christians seemed
no longer in the body. They saw things which
eye hath not seen. They were no longer men but
angels.'
The audience in the Court was mainly Com-
munist ; and included women luxuriously dressed,
and wearing costly jewellery ; it was a crowd that
applauded the demand for death sentences. The
presence also of a very different class of auditor is
worth recording, for no more vivid picture could be
imagined of the state of religious intolerance
prevailing in Soviet Russia in 1923 : ' I entered
into conversation with a half-starved youth of
eighteen or nineteen who informed me that he was
a deacon of the Catholic Church. In other words,
he was one of those young men who are now
studying for the priesthood in Moscow under
conditions which must approximate closely to the
conditions under which the studies of candidates
for the Christian priesthood were carried on at
Rome, in the time of Marcus Aurelius. These
students can only study in the evening or at night,
for by day they are employees in Soviet offices or
factories, or perhaps tailors, shop boys, or unskilled
labourers. They live together and pray together,
but they must needs pray cautiously, for every-
where in Moscow there are sharp ears listening
for the sound of prayer. How they manage to do
any work is beyond my comprehension, for they
lack books, candles, fuel, food.'
1
Throughout the
trial the determination of the Soviet Government
to destroy religion was evident ; a determination
tersely recapitulated by a leading member of the
Soviet administration, Zinovieff, eighteen months
later : ' We will grapple with the Lord God in due
season. We shall vanquish him in his highest
Heaven. '
2
The rancorous intolerance of the judges
appeared very clearly in the expression of savage
hate- that hate which the Soviet Minister of
Education has said to be so necessary ,-which
appeared on their faces, when looking at the
prisoners. The Government Prosecutor, Kry-
lenko, allowed himself to break out into a fury of
anti-religious hatred. ' I spit on your religion,'
he cried, ' as I do on all religions-on Orthodox,
1 F . McCullagh , The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity, p. 145.
I am indebted to this invaluable record, by an eye-witness, for this
account of the trial.
2 Zinovieff, Christmas Appeal to Fight Religion, December 1924.
Jewish, Mohammedan, and the rest.' Krylenko
further declared that to pray is a ' counter-
revolutionary act.' Hate and fury failed to disturb
the victims. Monsignor Budkievicz did no more
than represent each one of his fellow prisoners as
he as sure of his principles as ever,
and as httle mclmed to make any concession to the
temporary insanity raging around him as a
British Governor of the Gold Coast w;uld be
inclined to worship a fetish, and wear a loin cloth.'
The comparison is interesting. Precisely the same
analogy occurred to Mr. H. G. Wells when he
wrote that men of letters could no more live in
Russia under the Soviet Government than they
could in a Kaffir kraaU
The trial closed on the night of Palm Sunday,
25, I92J, after Archbishop Cieplak, speak-
mg for all his fellow prisoners, had solemnly
affirmed, 'standing on the threshold of death,'
that none of the prisoners had been actuated by
' counter-revolutionary ' or political aims.
This statement was frankly anticipated by that
of the Government journal, the Bezbojnik (the
' Godless '), when it announced that the death of
all the priests under trial was necessary because
their. Catholic was the principal enemy of
Atheist Commumsm.
2
The judgements, with the
two death sentences, were given at midnight. The
Archbishop gave to the people, who protested in
1
H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows p. 45
1
Bezbojnik, March 18, 1923. '
the Court, his blessing-' Benedicat vos Om-
nipotens Deus ' ; and all the priests were hurried
into the covered motor-lorry which was used
indifferently for conveying prisoners from the
Lubyanka Prison to the court, and for conveying
dead bodies out of the prison after execution.
Telegrams of protest poured into the Soviet
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from the Vatican,
England, France, Italy, the United States, Ger-
many, Spain, Switzerland, the Argentine, Belgium,
indeed from the whole world. Dr. Walsh, the
priest representative of the Vatican, requested, in
accordance with ' the ordinary usage in every
civilized country,' permission to visit the con-
demned men for two hours before their execution.
He received no answer. Late on the night of Good
Friday his telephone bell rang four times, but the
only sounds which came through were savage
laughter and ribald singing. It seems probable
that the ring was from No. I I Bolshoi Lubyanka,
for it was in a cellar of this prison that Monsignor
Budkiewicz was murdered during the night. The
usual Soviet barbarity of execution was employed.
The Monsignor was stripped naked, and then shot
through the back of the head, so that his face should
be unrecognizable. His body was wrapped in
a cloth, and taken in a motor-lorry to Sokolniki, a
suburb of Moscow, where it was buried together
with the bodies of nine thieves. As his body was
being hurried to that infamous grave, the priest of
every Catholic Church throughout the world was
so RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
singing the Easter Mass of that ' most sacred
night,' the noctem sacratissimum of the Resurrec-
tion ; bidding the hosts of heaven and the
angels to rejoice since the darkness overspreading
the whole world had been chased away in the
splendour of the risen Christ. The darkness
hanging over Soviet Russia was irradiated from
that Easter night, not only by the shining light of
martyrdom. Burning protests flashed from every
civilized country in the world. The Soviet per-
secutors, with the invariable cowardice of cruelty,
thereupon drew back. The protests came too late
to save Monsignor Budkiewicz from the midnight
assassins of the Lubyanka. But the death
sentence on Archbishop Cieplak was commuted to
solitary confinement ; and the life of Patriarch
Tikhon was saved. It is characteristic of the
mentality and the diction of the Soviet Govern-
ment that the nobly worded protests, from the
Governments and the Press or' the world, were
described as the cries of a ' chorus of counter-
revolutionary jackals and hyenas.'
A week later a Requiem Mass was celebrated for
the repose of the soul of Monsignor Budkiewicz in
the Church of SS. Peter and Paul, at Moscow.
Great Britain was officially represented ; and
outside the church, during the service, stood the
car of the British Mission, flying the British
flag-that flag beneath which religious freedom
is inviolate. Within the church hung another
flag on which were embroidered the words,
' Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build My
Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it.' .
The trial of Archbishop Cieplak and hts
eighteen fellow victims, followed by the martyrdom
of Monsignor Budkiewicz and the savage sentences
on the remaining priests, threw a brilliant search-
light over Soviet Russia, and manifested to the
whole world the nature of the forces in control of
the lives, but not the souls, of the Russian people.
A protest was issued at once in the Engl.ish Press
signed by Cardinal Bourne, the Archbtshops of
Canterbury and York, the leader of the Free
Churches, the Moderator of the Church of
Scotland, the General of the Salvation Army,.and
the Chief Rabbi. 'Never,' commented the Ttmes,
has such a united protest been made in defence
of the fundamental principles of religion,' and
in abhorrence of what the Soviet Government
has declared to be its ' war on the denizens of
Heaven.' The great English newspaper did not
hesitate to state further that the ' power that now
holds Russia in its grasp is a power that is fiercely
opposed to spiritual freedom, and one that has
struck a desperate blow at the very base of all
human society.'
To recount all the acts of the Russian martyrs
under the Soviet Government would need an
Acta Sanctorum of many volumes. Just two
incidents must suffice to show that young and old,
and even children, were at one in defence of their
52
faith. A young engineer was badly wounded
while endeavouring to check the profanation of a
Midnight Mass, during the Christmas of 1921.
He died a few hours afterwards. As he was dying
he scrawled this message on a slip of paper : ' It
is a most honourable privilege to be allowed to die
for our dear Faith. We Russians seem to have
this great honour now. May God be thanked.'
Russia had reason to thank God also for the faith
of her little children. In a suburban village, a few
miles from Petrograd, four children, three boys
and a girl, overheard some soldiers of the Red
Army saying that they intended to raid the village
church on the following night. The children got
into the church, and watched all night, crouched
upon the altar steps. As morning broke the
soldiers carne in, none too sober, to execute their
orders, and ordered the children away. The boys
said they were going to stay there, and to defend
Christ ; thereupon the soldiers fired. Two of the
children, wounded, fell on the altar ; the third boy,
also wounded, was carried horne. Before he died
he told his mother that he had seen Christ,
standing, smiling and radiant, and blessing with
outstretched hands the children who had laid
down their lives in his defence. The boy died,
his face shining with happiness. Salvete jlores
martyrum.
1
In the summer of 1923, following the Moscow
'trial,' and the 'judicial murder' of Monsignor
1
M. E. Almedingen, The Catholic Church in Russia, p. 130.
Budkiewicz, fifty-six Archbishops and. Bish?ps,
chiefly of the Orthodox Church, were m vanous
prisons ; and Archbishop Cieplak, an old man, .was
suffering the horrors of solitary confinement m a
Soviet prison in a cell measuring 6 feet by 8 feet.
In the autumn and winter carne fresh arrests. At
midnight on December 8 the Mother Superior of a
Dominican Convent, together with the members of
the Community, were brutally arrested by Red
soldiers in the presence of six Government agents,
and to the foul cells of the Lubyanka Prison.
Early in 1924 practically all the most prominent
Baptist ministers were arrested and conveyed an
unknown destination. They were charged With a
too zealous propaganda of religion ; the
of religion being tantamount to pohttcal
offence of undermining the Sovtet Govern-
rnent, ' since religion clashes directly with
rnunisrn.' The halls of the Salvat10n Army m
Moscow and Petrograd had already been closed ;
and a consignment of 40 ,ooo Bibles sent out by the
Church . Missionary Society was stopped .at the
frontier. Two young men who were
the Catholic priesthood were also arrested, their
only offence being that studied a
religion which a Bolshevtk decree
The Soviet Administration was parttcularly
active in its warfare on religion during the year
1925. On January I the Coun7il of
published a decree ordering the clo.smg
and ' liquidation ' of all rnonastenes. In Apnl an
54
anti-religious Conference was called, to stt m
Moscow, and to work out a new programme of
anti-religious agitation. In July eight priests
were condemned to rigorous solitary confinement,
for having arranged religious processions for
pilgrims who had been erecting crosses. The
Soviet Government was wise in its generation to
dread the 'victorious emblem of the Cross.' In
September the Administration demonstrated its
perfect impartiality in religious persecution by
seizing the principal synagogue in Kiev and
handing it over to a Communist' Godless' Club.
The outraged Jews appealed to a higher Soviet
authority at Harkov, only to have the decision of
the Kiev Soviet confirmed. In this month, also,
there appeared the first number of a new Govern-
ment organ, The Atheist, specially designed to
supplement the simple obscenities of the Bezbojnik
or ' Godless,' by combating religion on 'strictly
scientific grounds.' In October the trial was
announced of an entire agricultural community,
at Chernigov. The crimes of these agriculturists
were that they read the Bible daily, and taught the
to their children ; that they neglected
to sing the International; and that they did not
welcome the League of Communist Youth or
Komsomoltsi. This ecclesiastical year of the
Soviets was neatly rounded off by the arrest of
fifty Bishops, in the month of December. In the
following January, the New Year, 1926, opened
with the arrest of the Metropolitan Peter, of the
Orthodox Church, together with 500 clergy.
During the spring of this year the Government
was able to report the closing down, since 1917, of
364 churches in Petrograd alone.
Reinforced anti-religious activity has marked the
last two years of Soviet rule (1927-1928). The
official ' Anti-God ' League has been exceptionally
active. The Government has ordered the closing
of many Orthodox and Catholic churches and
Jewish synagogues, the premises of which were to
be converted into clubs. The acting Metropolitan
of the Orthodox Church, Mgr. Sergius, was im-
prisoned in 1927 on refusing the Soviet Govern-
ment's demand that he should excommunicate both
clerical and lay members of the Orthodox Church
living in exile ; and subsequently 50 Orthodox
dignitaries shared the fate of their Metropolitan.
Then, in July 1927, came an extended attack.
Orthodox prelates, to the number of II7, were
thrown into prison ; or were taken to concentra-
tion camps in the terrible Solvetsky Settlement, or
other northern districts ; or were exiled to Siberia,
Turkestan, and the Caucasus. These prelates
included 9 Metropolitans, 25 Archbishops, and 83
Bishops ; they had no trial, neither were they
accused of any crime. The agents of the Ogpu
( Cheka) simply arrested them and conveyed them to
their destination. The prelates confined in concen-
tration camps are compelled to act as porters, road
sweepers, night watchmen, and kitchen servants.
They are forbidden to hold ' any kind of religious
service.' The year 1927 concluded with orders for
an intensive anti-Christian campaign during
Christmas ; and by the announcement of the
forthcoming trial of the Catholic Suffragan Bishop,
Mgr. Skalski, charged, according to the official
/ organ of the Soviet Government, Izvestia, with
' influencing the religious masses against godless-
ness, which is equivalent to influencing them
against the Bolshevists themselves, whose doctrine
it is.'
It would be doing scant justice to the intelligence
of the Soviet rulers of Russia to suggest that their
openly proclaimed war upon ' the poison of
religion' was waged chiefly by the massacre, exile,
and imprisonment of Christians. Possibly some
of the more educated members of the Soviet
Ministry knew enough history to be aware of the
fructifying power of the blood of the martyrs. To
throw the bodies of the dead into sand-pits and
rivers and wells, or to give them burial with the
vilest of criminals was easy ; but it soon became
evident that a series of decrees, a network of
organizations, would be required to eradicate
religion from the minds and hearts of the living.
The two methods of attack are lucidly demon-
strated in the ABC of Communism, published by
the Soviet Government in March 1919. 'The
battle against religion,,. say the authors of this book,
one of whom, Bukharin, was a member of the Soviet
Ministry, ' has two aspects, which it is very
necessary for all Communists to distinguish. In
. the first place there is the struggle against the
Church, considered as a highly specialized organ-
ization for religious propaganda, interested materi-
ally in keeping the people in the bondage and dark-
ness of religion. In the second place there is the
struggle with religious prejudices deeply rooted
and widely spread among the multitude of manual
workers.'
1
Massacre, executions, tortures, im-
prisonments, and confiscations were the weapons
used in the first section of this battle front with
' the denizens of Heaven.' The weapons required
for the second line of attack were more subtle.
The Soviet Government lost no time in employing
them. Hardly had the Commissars assumed
power when compulsory lessons were instituted in
all schools, beginning with the youngest children,
called 'Atheism Courses.' Later, special officials
travelled from school to school giving lectures in
atheism. One of these lecturers, trying to prove
that religious belief is only ignorance, asked
triumphantly : ' Who can say that he has seen
God ? ' After a second of silence a boy's voice
replied : ' And have you seen that there is no
God ? ' Next came the penalizing of all religious
teaching for children, whether the teaching was
given privately by parents, or in schools. This was
effected by Clause 121 of the Criminal Code of the
Soviet Government, promulgated in 1919. The
1
E . Preobrajensky, The ABC of Communism. N. Bukharin,
Government edition, 1919. Par. 89.
B
ss
official explanation of this measure was that
' Religious instruction only leads to the obscuring
of the child's mind.' Further, all books with any
religious element were confiscated ; the ecclesi-
astical libraries were pillaged ; all ecclesiastical
colleges were closed ; and all printing of religious
books was prohibited-it must not be forgotten
that liberty of the printing press was promptly
abolished in Soviet Russia. All teachers in Soviet
schools and colleges were compelled to go through
a full course of training in' anti-religious 'propa-
ganda; and, conversely, teachers and professors
were removed who declined to become instruments
of Communist propaganda. It was declared that
parents must learn that their children do not
belong to them, but to ' the human race ' ; and
that they must be prevented from implanting in the
little ones ' the poison of religion.'
1
A decree
promulgated by a body entitled the ' Supreme
Church Soviet ' at Moscow- Communists are
radically deficient in a sense of humour-forbids
the baptism of children. If a child is found to have
visited a church he is expelled from school. A
student of a Polytechnic in $outhern Russia
writes : ' Religion with us is held to be exploded
stuff, and a thing positively bad.'
In November 1922 an Anti-Religious Seminary
was opened at Moscow, under the direction of
' practised anti-Christian speakers,' and of
1 E. Preobraj ensky, The ABC of Communism. N. Bukharin,
Government edition, 1919. Par . 79
' science ' masters, to which was attached an anti-
. religious library .
1
Conversely, University students
at Moscow and at Petrograd, who tried to take a
degree in Church History, were refused the
standard monthly allowance of food and money.
For some this meant semi-starvation.
2
The
Vladivostok Communist Soviet distinguished
itself by issuing an order for the confiscation of all
books in which the words ' God ' or ' Providence '
occurred ; and the Soviet police removed ten
cartloads of books from the second-hand book-
shops.
The provision Jor a rising generation, quite
extricated from ' the morass of religion,'
3
having
thus been made, the problem of the adult still
remained. This problem was attacked by street
processions, by theatrical representations, by
posters, by the cinema, by the Government press,
and by lectures. An 'Atheist Theatre' was
opened in Moscow, under Government auspices.
The lecture' Religion and Communism,' by S. R.
Minin, was considered most effective, and was
delivered repeatedly in Moscow, and in the
provinces, to audiences of over I ,ooo persons. A
Soviet Government circular informed the people
that ' religion is the brutalization of the people.''
Two Government newspapers were, and are still,
1
Izvestia, November 18, 1922.
2
M. E. Almedingen, Catholic Church in Russia, p. 81 .
3
' First of all the people must be free from the morass of religion.'
Zinovieff, speech at Halle, October q , 1920.
Circular of December 26, 1921,
6o RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
circulated, one the Atheist, prepared for the more
cultivated reader, the other the Bezbojnik, the
obscenities of which its authors were surprised to
find were not always appreciated.
It was in one of the first numbers of this
official Bezbojnik that the Soviet Minister of
Education, M. Lunacharsky, wrote: 'With all
my heart I wish the Bezbojnik every success in
its warfare against the revolting spectre of God,
who throughout the whole of history has caused
such diabolical evil to mankind.'
If an English Minister, of whatever political
party, gave official and public utterance to phrases
such as this, his colleagues would hastily convey
him to the decent obscurity of a nursing home.
To the colleagues of M. Lunacharsky his pious
wish was entirely commendable and natural. It is
in an incident such as this that the soul of the
Soviet Government is unveiled.
Blasphemous articles and cartoons were. also
freely produced in the Government organs
Pravda and Izvestia. Cartoons, issued in 1923, in
Izvestia were ' often of too disgusting a character
to be described.' The' Soviet Laureate,' Damian
Bodny, celebrated Easter week I 92 5 by publishing
a series of verses caricaturing and ridiculing the
birth of Christ, and the Church. The provincial
papers were careful not to lag behind those pub-
lished in Moscow. The Christmas number of the
Communist of Harkov for 1923 had a series of
' scientific ' atheist articles; and, also, a selection
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION 6x
of pornographic verses written in relation to the
Nativity. These verses became popular, being
sung by groups of young Communist men and
women to the air of' The Last Tango.' Certainly
the English Labour Member, Mr. J. Sexton, was
abundantly justified when he observed that
' Communists, to-day, follow a policy of moral
assassination. There are some curs of the human
species that would contaminate the toe of the boot
that kicked them.'
1
Inspired by the Minister of
Education, Lunacharsky, the Atheist Colleges
prepared young men and women as ' missionaries
of impiety.' Theatrical representations have been
devised, throughout Russia, parodying the Gospels
with a bestial obscenity impossible to describe in
these pages.
2
The actors, by whom all the relations
of human life are openly carried out before the
audience, may be boys and girls. These ' spec-
tacles' are enacted both in villages and in towns.
They are considered particularly instructive for
the soldiers of the Red Army. Thus, a per-
formance was given at the Moscow Garrison Club,
in the presence of Trotzky, and of five hundred
soldiers, called 'The Trial of God.' At this
performance figures representing the Divine
Persons of the Trinity were placed in the dock.
Posters are freely used ; a well-known example is
1
J. Sexton, M.P., Speech, August 28, 1921.
2
The organizer of the blasphemous and obscene theatrical
propaganda of the Soviet Government is E. V. Meyerhold. Meyer-
hold is a German, born in Russia. He is the Director of the now
famous Revolutionary Theatre in Moscow.
6z RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
that of the proletarian climbing up a ladder, with a
hammer in his hand, to attack the figures of
Christ; Mahomet, and Moses. The clergy are
represented in these posters as evil livers, and as
huge leering spiders.
Christmas apparently rouses Soviet officials
to a gibbering paroxysm of anti-Christian hatred,
combined with hatred for all the greater religions.
In 1923 the official Communist League of Youth,
and the Communist University Students' Organ-
ization, combined in a great Anti-Christian
Demonstration. Instructions to local branches
were given for anti-religious lantern-slide lectures.
Effigies of Christ, Buddha, Abraham, Moses, and
Osiris were paraded through the streets, and
processions, orations, plays, satires, and debates
were carried out. These activities were witnessed
in every large city in Russia. Ribald parodies of
the Christian Mass, and of Mahomedan ceremonies
were enacted. A figure labelled' Almighty God'
was burnt ; and effigies were carried in a proces-
sion chiefly made up of young men from the
Universities, and boys and girls, ridiculing Christ,
the Blessed Virgin, Buddha, Confucius, and
Mahomet. Thousands of leaflets were thrown to
the crowds with the famous saying of Marx, now
inscribed on the entrance to the Kremlin,' Religion
is the opium of the people.' In many cities the
effigies of Christ, Jehovah, Moses, and Mahomet
were burnt, while the members of the League of
Commul!ist Youth danced and sang and kissed.
The headquarters of this League, in Moscow,
considered the demonstrations to have been a great
success ; and a writer in the Government organ
Izvestia declared that ' when all the world over the
poisonous mists of various religions are dispelled,
mankind . . . will gratefully remember that the
first public challenge to God was made in Soviet
Russia, January 7, 1923. Our Soviet young men
have been the first to break the celestial front.'
During the following Christmas, that of 1924,
the young Communists were restrained in their
crude riot of obscenities, which were found to have
disgusted rather than persuaded ; and older
agitators were put in charge. But Zinovieff was
careful to point out that this alteration in the
' Christmas campaign against God ' did not mean
any slackening of effort. In a special appeal
Zinovieff declared : ' We will grapple with the
Lord God in due season. We shall vanquish him
in his highest Heaven and wherever he seeks
refuge, and we shall subdue him for ever. But we
. . . must be cautious, much more cautious
than hitherto.' Large quantities of' anti-religious
agitation ' literature were despatched to the
villages for distribution during this Christmas.
The Young Pioneer Movement, the Communist
League for implanting Communism and atheism
in children, contributed an article to the Christmas
number of Izvestia for this year, announcing that
the children will believe in neither God nor devil ,
and will ' wage active war on our obsolete religious
parents,'-thus splitting the family in two. Ribald
and obscene atheism is now being forced upon the
children of Russia, by posters, by songs, by
stories, by school lessons, by lectures and debates.
Month after month, for eleven years, the flood of
obscenity and blasphemy has been poured over
Russia, and has been directed down every channel
by which the people could be reached. But the
divine image in man has proved, during these years
of conflict, to be stronger than the narrow-minded
fanatics of the Kremlin had conceived to be
possible. So, in the face of repeated defeats the
Soviet Government inculcated redoubled energy,
and more subtle forms of attack. ' We are as bent
on destroying religion as ever,' wrote the Govern-
ment organ Izvestia, ' but we must acrvery warily.'
The fact was deplored that some Communists
failed to observe Section XIII of the General
Orders of the Communist Party, a section which
obliges ' all members of the Party to carry on
anti-religious propaganda.' This failure was
officially stigmatized as ' the violation of the Party
Programme in the sphere of religion.'
1
Priests
were no longer publicly tried, or murdered in the
open ; they simply disappeared, often being
banished to Siberia, without warm clothing, and in
barely heated trains. One batch of these victims
of wariness arrived at their destination literally
frozen to death. A permanent Society of ' Anti-
1
Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Unit ed States
Senate, 192 4 , p. 171, quoting I 8vestia, March 31, 1921.
God Workers was formed for the purpose of
bringing the whole movement under one cautious
central authority,' as experience had shown that
'frontal attacks, however brilliantly organized,
availed nothing against religion,' and have even
' produced reactionary results by stimulating
dormant religious prejudices.'
' It is necessary to work slowly, word by word,......
drop by drop,' wrote the Soviet Government
journal Pravda, ' to worm our way and to convince
the stubborn that, by the unwritten decrees of the
victorious proletariat, the inhabitants of Heaven
and all their attributes have been abolished. With
an iron broom the workers must clear their homes
of the last vestige of all that is " holy." '
1
By way
of hastening this process in the homes of the
workers, the Soviet Trade Union authorities, under
the presidency ofM. Tomski, who was not long ago
feted in England, issued a circular in August 1927,
addressed to the provincial Trade Union centres,
urging the local organizations to ' revive the
compulsory anti-religious agitation, which must
occupy an essential place in all trade-union
educational work.'
Still the people of Russia failed to respond.
As Pravda wrote regretfully: 'It is not easy
to sweep that which is divine from the homes of the
workmen. '
2
'The town workers did indeed manifest,
in valiant moments of defiance of the Red Terror,
a very definite objection to the' War on Heaven.'
1 Pravda, May 1923.
2 Ibid., March I r , 1921.
When the wholesale sentences of death and of
imprisonment were being passed on the priests of
Petrograd, and the Bishop of Kronstadt was con-
demned to death, work in all factories and work-
~ o p s was suspended, for one day, in Petrograd,
Kronstadt, and other northern towns ; and
meetings were held, throughout the day, demand-
ing a reprieve. Even the sailors of the Baltic
Fleet, that stronghold of Communism, showed
their discontent. This smouldering resistance of
the Christian population of the towns, smothered
by the army of spies organized by the Ogpu and the
Cheka, and more openly beaten down by the
soldiers of the Red Army, flamed out persistently
and ultimately triumphed in the country. Both on
the spiritual and the economic front, it is the
Russian peasant, alone, who has baffled the
fanatics of international Communism ruling in
Moscow. The peasant was winning his decisive
victories, in the villages of Russia, when the Allied
Armies were being driven back on three fronts by
the Red Armies of Trotzky, and when the private
trader was being exterminated. He gained his
economic victory by his immovable stand for the
right, always affirmed by the Catholic Church, to
hold private property. He gained the spiritual
victory by a like immovable stand for the right to
worship God as his conscience bade him. During
eleven years of persecution the Russian people, in
the villages and countryside, have held that
' celestial front ' which their Communist masters
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION
had boasted was broken for ever. The glorious
record of Russian martyrdoms, during those years,
closes in victory for the Christian faith. The dark
and cruel forces of modern paganism have spent
themselves in vain. 'As before,' observes an
amazed Communist narrator writing in 1924,
' the church is the centre of the village life, where
marriages, christenings, and burial services are
regularly carried out.'
1
All the children get
religious instruction, and the Soviet law, making it
a criminal act to teach religion to a child, is a dead
letter in the villages. The priests have sufficient
maintenance and housing ; while the village
remains quite unconcerned as to the roofless
schools, erected by the Soviet Administration, with
their atheist teachers. 'We have nothing to do
with them,' say the villagers; and they proceed to
ensure excellent remuneration for the priest's
wife, who teaches the children of the village.
Not only the peasants, but the workers also, are
now asserting that right to freedom of religious
action, formally assured to them by the Sov!et
Constitution, and immediately annulled in practice
by the Soviet administrators.
2
'The religious
movement, in Russia, is becoming a sort of
epidemic,' is the rueful comment of a member of
the Prresidium of the Central Executive Com-
mittee of the Soviet Government, P. Smidovich.
1 Yakovlev, The Village as it is. Moscow, 1924. . . .
2 Principles of the Constitution of the Federal Soclll;h?t Repubhc
of the Russian Soviet, 1918, par. 13 : ' Freedom of religiOus propa-
ganda is ensured to every citizen. '
' It has already seized the small bourgeois elements,
and is now (1923) devastating the workers and
peasants. Since the autumn all the roads to
monasteries, and all the old routes followed by
pilgrims, are covered with long lines of people
going to the holy places.' Mr. L. Lawton, writing
in 1926, records as' a sign of the time,' the' rush
of educated men to join the priesthood.'
1
In the
following year the Soviet Press is forced to admit
further evidence of the victorious power of the
Cross. The Krasnaia Gazeta of March 22, 1927,
records that a new church has been built with the
aid of the workers at the large textile factory known
as the ' Communist Vanguard ' in the province
of Vladimer which employs 7 ,ooo men ; and
another church has been built at the ' Red
October Factory ' belonging to the Penza Cloth
Trust, with 2,ooo workers. In the province of
Smolensk .the 8,ooo men of the Yartzoff Mills
are following the lead of these two factories.
At the ' Red Factory ' a special body of collectors
was formed, in different guilds, for the building
fund ; and on each pay-day all the small change of
the workers was given. The new churches are
erected alongside the old ones which the Soviet
rulers had converted into clubs and cinemas.
'All which,' adds the Krasnaia Gazeta, 'is taking
place not in out-of-the-way corners, but in the
principal industrial centres, under our very eyes.'
Similar evidence comes from the circular issued in
1
L. Lawton, The Russian Revoluti on, 1927, p. 257.
August 1927 by the Central Council of the Soviet
Trade Unions, deploring the active support being
given by many trade unionists to the building of
new churches and attendance at public worship.
The indomitable faith of the Russian people
stirs their Soviet rulers to fresh efforts. Early in
1928 an order was issued by the Soviet Govern-
ment the intention of which was, manifestly, the
extermination of the Catholic priesthood in Russia.
In April the Government press was declaring that
' Local authorities must, without loss of time,
throw all the necessary forces on to the Anti-God
front .... We must declare war to the death, a
war upon all forms of religion.' This ' war ' is to
include 'Anti-God' plays, spectacles, and films.
During Easter, 1928, the Soviet Ministry of Edu-
cation organized ' special evenings of humour and
satire ' to draw the people away from the churches ;
and all the Soviet wireless stations were instructed
to broadcast an anti-religious programme. The
year closed with a decision to expel from the
Soviet Trade Unions any member 'guilty' of
taking part in a religious service ; and with the
opening of a new Anti-Religious University, at
Moscow, in which the Soviet Minister of Health
and the Minister of Education are lecturers, and
which has already enrolled over 6oo students.
CHAPTER IV
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND EDUCATION
' The darkness of absolute ignorance begins to descend on the
children of the Russian Revolution.'
Report by the Soviet Minister of Education,
Lunacharsky, 1923.
T
HERE is a profound difference in the
attitude of the Soviet Commissars towards
education, and that displayed by the
same men towards religion. The action of Mos-
cow in regard to all forms of religion is purely
destructive. The Public Prosecutor of the Soviet
Government declares: 'I spit on all religions.'
The Soviet Minister of Education says : ' We
hate the Christians.' The Soviet Ambassador to
France witnessed with appreciative laughter a
mock Mass, enacted by his principal private
secretary, on Easter night. The Soviet Minister
of War writes: 'Revolutionary morality dethrones
God ' ; and he presides at publicly enacted
blasphemies. The Soviet Gazette declares : ' Our
task is to fight against Religion.' Religion is
officially announced to be ' the opium of the
people.' It is treated as a popular vice, to be
stamped out by capital punishment, by torture
and imprisonment, by ridicule, and by contempt.
The attitude of the Moscow Government, on the
70
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND EDUCATION 71
other hand, towards education is furiously con-
structive. The present rulers of Russia are filled
with a visionary enthusiasm for the introduction
of the ' new learning ' which they conceive to be
fitted to the proletarian civilization. For this
proletarian ' new learning ' they have coined a new
word-the Proletcult. The old education was, of
course, to be swept away in the torrent of universal
destruction demanded by the Communist pro-
gramme. This was easily and rapidly effected in
certain towns. The majority of the professors,
teachers, and pupils escaped out of Russia,-six
thousand Russian students found refuge in the
Universities of Prague alone; and thousands are
scattered throughout Europe, America, and the
East. Others were either shot, dismissed, or
expelled. The faculties of law, history, and
literature have been abolished in almost every
Russian University, being replaced by compulsory
courses in the history of Materialism, the history of
Socialism, and the history of the Communist
Party. Admission to Universities is limited when
possible to the members of ' The Communist
League of Youth.' At the recent election of new
members to the Leningrad Academy of Sciences
vacancies were filled with men ' qualified ' in
Marxism and revolutionary tactics, instead of in
the usual sciences.
In the summer of 1924 great numbers of students
were expelled from the Universities, in all of which
agents of the Ogpu or Cheka have carried on con-
stant espionage. In this summer every student was
tested with regard to his Communist views and
his 'proletarian origin.' The work was carried
out by specially appointed Chekists. As a result,
many students were expelled from the Universities,
and their careers ruined. Many tried to get
abroad ; and many committed suicide. ' In the
autumn of I 924 there was an epidemic of suicide
among Russian students.' Several hundred
students were arrested in Moscow, and taken to
the fetid, crowded, and unspeakably filthy cells
of the Lubyanka No. 2, and there confined, for
some weeks. They were then forced to remain
under the control of the Cheka ; or else deported
for three years to the living death of the Suzdal, or
Solovetsky Concentration Camps, or to penal
servitude for life in the Narym region of Siberia.
' Such was the tragic end of the famous Russian
Students' Corps, which, during the years of the
Revolution, and in Tsarist times, had always
fought heroically, with youthful fiery idealism, for
the cause of the liberation of the people.'
1
The
same process was going on in I925 when, for
example, 30 per cent of the medical students at
Kiev were expelled from the Medical Institute,
as not being Communists.
In the curriculum of the schools, history and
literature are taught as vehicles of Communist
propaganda. School education (like everything
else) is made compulsory ; and a decree has been
1
George Popoff, The Cheka, 1925, p. 259.
promulgated requiring working men and women
to go to school for two hours daily. The villagers
proved themselves to be more than a match for the
autocrats of Moscow in the matter of spending
two hours daily on the school bench ; whereupon
Moscow devised the scheme of special weeks ' for
the abolition of illiteracy.' During such a ' week '
a round-up of the older men and women of the
village would be organized, much to the scandal
of local opinion, and with very little reduction, it
may be surmised, of illiteracy.
The statistics of the Soviet Ministry of Educa-
tion have to be taken with reserve, as they include
schools without either teachers or equipment ;
but, allowing for such terminological inexactitudes,
the figures for the new era do not convey educa-
tional progress. In I9I3 the number of elementary
schools was 64,000, in I923 49,000; the number
of pupils in secondary schools in I9I3 was 300,50o,
in I923 it was 24o,ooo; the number of students
during the same period, in the technical schools,
had fallen from I7o,ooo to 53,000. The salary
of teachers in towns in I 924 was a third of
the very poor salary paid under the Tsarist
regime, with an enormously increased cost of
living ; and even this pittance was not paid
regularly. The rate of pay provided by the Soviet
Government for their school teachers, coupled
with the morale of Communism, may account for
the conditions of the Soviet teaching profession
ofilcially reported by the Minister of Education,
F
74
in 1925 : ' Our male and female teachers prostitute
themselves, or commit suicide. The rest run away,
and it is impossible to replace them.'
1
. In March
1
927 the official rate of pay for Sov1et teachers
was 40 roubles, 4 IS. per month.
2

As regards equipment, all books, penodicals,
and papers were of course nationalized when the
Soviet Commissars assumed power. The results
for education were not happy. A woman teache.r
of a village school writes : ' In 191? each
received only one pencil and two mbs. Dunng
three years we never received any textbooks. We
could only teach geography through old periodicals
and magazines which we found at hand.'
3
In the year when the Soviet was
applying pure Communism to Russia, a VISitor to
Moscow was shown the specimen Government
school at the Hotel de !'Europe, and found every-
thing a luxurious scale. She was delighted.
The next day a friend called while supper was
preparing. 'Don't throw away those potato
peelings I' cried the ca!ler,. who wa.s of a
girls' school. ' Why ? said The
children are so glad of them, said the matron.
' Children!' said the visitor, ' they have every-
thing,-" first" rations.' ' Come to my
said the matron. They went, not accompamed by
an official guide. There were 65 children in the
1 Lunacharsky in I zvestia, October 26, 1925.
2 Trood, March 16--20, 1927.
s Makeev, Russia, pp. 292-3.
school, most of them without shoes, and con-
stantly hungry ; and they were sharing 20 wooden
spoons amongst them. The Minister of Education
reported, in 1923, that the schools had broken
windows; that they needed blackboards, maps,
copy books, and paper ; and that the refectories
were so dirty that the children contracted diseases.
The Report for 1924 states that the children were
still being taught in dilapidated buildings, which
were rarely heated (in the Russian winter the
thermometer falls to 20 degrees below zero) ; one
lead pencil would be shared by ten children ;
there were very few books ; and the report
revealed that ' the number of schools and pupils is
diminishing every day.' This it will be noted is
after seven years of Soviet rule. In the Report
for 1925 it was again declared by the Minister of
Education, Lunacharsky,
1
that the schools were
in a deplorable condition, roofless and unheated ;
and that great quantities of books printed by the
Government remained in the warehouses because
the teachers were unwilling to use them-history
and literature converted into Communist propa-
ganda might well prove a stumbling block to the
unfortunate pedagogues. In this year, after eight
y ars of unfettered Communist Government,
Lunacharsky reported that in many parts of
Russia less than 20 per cent of the children, of
chool age, attended school ; and that, throughout
1
1
I l is int eresting t o not e t hat the Soviet Minister of Education,
I '"" h:uaky, was formerly a member of the Secret Police of t he
I .1 t regime, in the espionage sect ion of Nijni-Novgorod.
the Soviet territories, there were fewer than so per
cent of the children at school. In August 1926,
the Minister of Education admitted that ' there is
no hope in the near future of any advance in the
education of the people.' Since 1921 there had
been a decline of 2,ooo,ooo pupils attending
elementary schools. The number in 1926 was
less than under the Tsarist regime.
1
At the close
of 1928 a Congress was convened at Moscow to
discover why Soviet education had ' gone back-
ward rather than forward.' In the principal re-
public of the Soviet Union, the R.S.F.S.R., the
illiterates had increased in four years by 4,ooo,ooo,
and there are 28,ooo,ooo in this area alone who
can neither read nor write. A few weeks pre-
viously Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, declared that
' utter disorder prevails in the whole school
system.'
2
Evidently the advance of the 'new
learning ' has halted on the road.
3
It is well, however, for the children of Russia
that they should escape attendance at the Soviet
schools. For the terrible physical suffering of the
children, and the depths of their mental ignorance,
sink into insignificance in comparison with the
moral degradation inflicted by the Proletcult. The
1 L . Lawton, The Russian Revolution, 1926, p . 403.
At a Plenary Conference of the Young Communist s' League,
Oct ober 1928.
s The Soviet Government organ, I zvestia, wr ot e in November
1928: All st andards on the educational front remain considerably
behind pre-revolutionary st andards.'
Soviet schools are always mixed ; the boys and
girls have complete freedom ; and they sleep
in the same dormitory. A leading member of
the Soviet Administration, and Ambassador suc-
cessively to Norway and to Mexico, Alexandra
Kollontai, who was welcomed by the English
Press on a recent visit to England, wrote in
1922: ' Immorality in the schools is making
satisfactory progress ; many young girls of fifteen
are already pregnant. We may rejoice, for we shall
have some new little Communists.' In 1924 a
Report was read by M. Yaroslavsky, before the
Central Executive Committee of Soviets, in session
at Moscow, stating that the custom was spreading
of ' practising abortion among quite young
children.' In one area there was a Maternity
Hospital adjacent to some of the Soviet schools.
In eighteen months more than one hundred girls,
from these schools, were admitted to this Hospital.
1
One of the masters in a Moscow Academy describes
the new Proletcult education quite frankly : ' The
boys and girls are herded together indiscriminately,
and there is no semblance of morality. There is
no pretence at discipline. Pupils do exactly as they
please, even walking in and out in the middle of a
lesson. No punishments are inflicted, no home-
\ ork is set, and no marks are allowed. Each class
haR its own committee; these committees control
the masters.' The Head Mistress of one boarding
' lwol was a professional prostitute, a fact known
1
C. Sarolea, I mpressions of Soviet Russia, p. g8.
to the Soviet authorities; and in 1925 the Soviet
Prime Minister, M. Rykoff, speaking at a Teachers'
Conference at Moscow, observed that licentious-
ness and corruption raged not only among the lower,
but also among the higher Soviet institutions.
These nauseous facts are the outcome of a care-
fully devised section of the tactics of International
Communism. The International Communist is
perfectly aware that one of the most intractable of
the obstacles to that world domination of Com-
munism, for which every sincere Communist is
working, is the general recognition, by the peoples
of the world, of certain primary moral obligations.
Hence the indefatigable and organized replace-
ment, in Communist education, of morality by
lust, and the insistence on the educational
formula of the Proletcult, as regards morality,
which is expressed in the phrase everything is
allowed.
1
The application of this formula during
eleven years to the Communistic youth of the
Russian towns has naturally resulted in wholesale
debauchery; a debauchery, moreover, which is
welcomed. A member of the Komsomol, the
' League of Communist Youth,' writes : ' it was
necessary not merely to fight against bourgeois
morality, but to trample it under foot. '
2
This
systematic Soviet trampling of morality ' under
foot ' has been carried out among the lads and
girls (and indeed among the adults also, by means
of obscene posters and representations) with a
1
Madame Smidovich, Pravda, March 24, 1925.
8
Pravda, May 7, 1925.
thoroughness the facts of which cannot be tran-
scribed into English print. It is a formula adopted
with consideration by the Soviet Government.
Communism, we are told, ' deliberately banishes
all moral law.' As a prominent colleague of
Stalin, and one who has survived the expulsions of
Trotzky, Zinovieff, and other Opposition leaders,
M. Yaroslavsky has said : 'all that is favourable
to the Party and the class, as a whole is moral ;
everything that is not, is immoral.'
1
On this point
M. Yaroslavsky joins hands with his opponent
Trotzky, for Trotzky has acclaimed the fact that
' Revolutionary morality dethrones all absolute
standards.'
2
A world educated to recognize no
absolute standards is the ideal world of the
Communist Proletcult. It is an ideal which over-
crowds the Soviet maternity hospitals with child
patients ; and leads the administrative authorities
to issue decrees such as No. 259 of the Soviet
Commissariat of Health and Justice : ' any
woman desiring to interrupt pregnancy by artificial
means may have this operation performed, free of
charge, in any of the Soviet Hospitals where the
maximum harmlessness of such an operation can
be guaranteed.'
3
It is an ideal the immediate
results of which have already disturbed the
practical mind of Y aroslavsky. In the Report
already quoted on ' Party (i.e. Communist Party)
1 Ibid. , October 9, 1924. M. Yar oslavsky, in common with
rnany of his colleagues, rules in Russia under an alias. His r eal
nan1e is Gubelmann.
2
Trot zky, Between Red and White, p . 52.
8
Izvestia, November 18, 1920.
So RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
Ethics,' which was' presented to the Central
Executive Committee of the Soviets in Moscow, in
1924, Yaroslavsky says, speaking of the increase in
Communist Russia of t'he practice of abortion, even .
among quite young children, 'no strong, healthy
men and women can develop from a generation
which is ruining itself, from childhood, by sexual
intercourse and frequent abortions.'
1
It is an
ideal so fervently practised by Communist youth
that the well-known Communist, Madame Smido-
vich, has considered the matter to be of sufficient -
interest to justify an article written in March 192 5,
in Pravda. ' Communist youth,' writes Madame
Smidovich, 'evidently believes that the most
primitive approach to questions of sexual passion
is really a Communistic one. Everything which .
does not fall into a way of life which might be
good enough for Hottentots, or even still more
primitive races, is qualified as being bourgeois.'
2
Any Communist girl who will not accept the
advances of a Communist lad is in danger of being
denounced as a bourgeoise. Mr. H. G. Wells,
writing five years earlier, found that ' every moral
standard is a subject for debate in the mixed
schools ' ; and he attributes much of what he
frankly describes as ' the appalling moral condition
of the youth of both sexes ' to the educational
methods of the Proletcult. During eleven years of
power the educational policy of the Soviet Govern-
ment has remained frankly anti-moral.
1 Pravda, October 9, 1924.
2
Ibid., March 24, 1925.
Another interesting ideal of the ' new learning '
was enunciated at a Congress of Ukrainian
Teachers, by M. Shumski, Commissar for Educa-
tion in the great area of the Ukraine. M. Shumski
declared that ' politics must be the corner-stone in
the upbringing of children.' Recently a more
intensive attack on religion, for the Soviet schools.
Krupskaya declared, in December 1928, that the
Soviet schools must be more actively anti-religious,
that they must ' combat the home influence of
religious parents.'
A further result on the children of Russia of the
inculcation of the Communist formulas, ' every-
thing is allowed ' and ' everything belongs to
everybody,' soon became evident in the terrible
statistics of criminality among minors with which
the Soviet Government is faced. Thieving among
children has reached incredible proportions ; the
proceeds of the robberies being often ' invested,'
by the child thieves, in vodka or in cocaine, or
else gambled away. Pravda described, in 1923,
tl1e 12 or 13 years old boys who' murder and rob,
and bring their loot to their mistresses, who also
are only 12 or 13 years old.' Agents of the
Moscow Soviet, investigating these conditions in
1923, found girl prostitutes of 10 and 15 years
old, who practically lived on vodka and cocaine.
That this was no incidental fact is shown by the
figures of child criminality four years previously.
'll1us, in 1919, Petrograd, with a population of
6oo,ooo, registered ro,ooo cases of ' infantile
I
crime.' In 1920, children formed 6 per cent of the
street criminals registered in Russia. Two years
later, in 1922, the proportion had risen to the
terrible figure of ro per .. cent.
1
During only
six months, in 1923, children in the Ukraine
under 13 years of age had committed 29,317

crtmes.
In the year following, 1924, the Soviet Govern-
ment issued a decree requiring that steps be taken
to combat the growth of crime among the young.
Since this date 245 Commissions have been
appointed to deal with the problem of these
results of the 'new education.' In Odessa and
Nikolaviev 1 15 ,ooo children were registered who
gained their living by begging, thieving, murder,
and plunder. In I 92 5 Lunacharsky, Minister
of Education, declared that the criminal children
of Russia had become ' dangerous enemies of
society.' In 1926 an official pronouncement
deplored the increasing number of acts of violence
committed by children.
In placing on record the extent of juvenile crime,
under the Soviet Administration of Russia, the
element of the countless thousands of waif children,
so characteristic of the Russia of _to-day, must not
be overlooked. This 'dark sea of child misery
and suffering, driving children into vice, crime,
and hatred of society,' to use M. Lunacharsky's
description,
2
has been ascribed by the apologists
1
Statistics given by the Information Bureau of the' Workmen's
and Peasants .. Inspection.'
2
Appeal by M. Lunacharsky, May 1925.
for the Soviet rulers to the blockade of the
Allies of 1918-2o, and to the famine of 1921-22.
The logic of these apologists is confuted by the
facts acknowledged by the Soviet authorities
themselves. In 1925 Lunacharsky described the
vagrant children as a great stream, threatening ' to
develop into a polluting flood poisoning the entire
current of life.' In the same year the widow of
Lenin, Krupskaya, courageously protested against
the habit of the Soviet authorities of sending
vagrant children of Moscow and other towns
away to remote districts, ' where they perish far
from the sight of Moscow's citizens, whose eyes
their presence in the streets of Moscow offended.'
1
It may be added that the presence of these
children would open the eyes of visitors and
delegations to Moscow. The waif children of
Moscow alone, towards the close of this year, I 92 5,
were estimated at 25,000 ; and in this year the
Soviet authorities officially notified ' the great
increase ' of the general ' Soviet army of vagrant
children.' The waif children of Moscow had
increased to 3o,ooo in the following year, 1926.
Many of the children were drug addicts. In May
I 926 the number of Soviet waif children was
double that recorded in the previous year ; and
tl1ese children were reported to be children of both
1 asants and factory workers. The Soviet Com-
lissar of Health reported, in October 1928, that
1
l\Iadame Krupskaya was also insistent in disclosing, during
J 25, the I revolting conditions of the Soviet "Homes for
hildren. " '
during the two previous months, in Moscow, 5,968
homeless waifs had been interned in the concen-
tration camps. Most of them were infected with
disease. The majority were from families of
peasants who had been shot by the Government.
These records given by the Soviet Administration
cannot be explained away by events occurring in
1918-22.
The basic doctrines of the Proletcult education
are not such as to appeal to the majority of
Russian parents ; and it soon became obvious
to the Communist visionaries that their ' new
learning ' could only be taught if the child was
segregated from the religious and moral influences
of its father and mother. Therefore in the schools
of Communist Russia we have, to quote Mr. H. G.
Wells, 'the break-up of the family in full pro-
gress.'1 M. Makeev points out, in his meticu-
lously impartial review of Soviet Russia, that ' in
the new morality the conception of the family
should be completely excluded.'
2
It follows that
the new educational system must also provide
Homes for the' segregated' children, preparatory
to their reaching school age. The town children-
the village, as we shall see, steadfastly rejects the
Proletcult-have therefore been institutionalized
,
to adopt Mr. Wells's expressive phrase. The
economic conditions, induced by the pressure of
strictly applied Communist ideals in economics,
1
H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows, p. 107.
Makeev and O'Hara, Russia, p. 287.
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND EDUCATION s
5
facilitated this scheme of child segregation, as many
parents were no longer able to maintain their
children; 'entire towns,' writes Mr. Wells,' were
sinking down towards slum conditions and the
Bolshevik Government has had to play the part of
a gigantic Dr. Barnardo.' The Barnardo Homes
might well claim damages for libel from Mr. Wells.
The educational institutions in which the
children have been placed are comparable in
horror to those foulest of all the inventions of
the visionaries of the Soviet Government, the
prisons of the Cheka. In the ' Homes ' for new-
born children only one per cent survived. An
official investigation into the ' children's colonies '
of the Kherson Government found that infant im-
morality, formerly an exception, had 'become a
normal occurrence,' both in the Children's Homes
and in the schools ; out of 5 ,ooo girls between the
ages of 9 and 13, who were examined, 77 per cent
were ruined. When a' First Experimental Com-
mune for Children' was set up, in a farm near
Moscow, the villagers had to supply the children,
who were starving, with food. The principals of
the Commune were re-selling the children's food,
at a large profit. Among the children of this
Commune venereal disease was rife. Izvestia, in
an article published in October 1922, says that
the moral atmosphere of the official Homes for
Children ' is of the most incredible nature, and the
children in them are reduced to a state of absolute
moral and physical exhaustion. Owing to an
absence of proper and complete isolation of the
morally corrupted children the rest are subjected
to a gradual process of contamination.' In another
Soviet State Home six or eight children were
allotted to one bed ; they ate out of old jam-jars ;
their little bodies were covered with vermin
'
they screamed with terror and pain. The Save
the Children Fund might well turn its attention to
the souls and bodies of the children in the State
Homes and Schools of Soviet Russia.
It is not surprising that the parents had to be
compelled to yield up their children to the
Communist 'Homes.' A report, published in
Izvestia, in September I 9 I 9, describes how children
from the age of three were being forcibly taken
from their parents and placed in State institutions,
to . be educated in the Proletcult. ' To protect
from the pernicious influence of parents
wtth bourgeois sympathies, visits are forbidden.'
At this date, 7 ,ooo children under the age of ten
had been removed to State Homes ; many died
owing to lack of food and care. Parents who
objected were arrested. Well might the English
Communist, Mr. Bertrand Russell, write, after his
visit to Russia in 1920, 'the whole temper of the
seemed to be directed to breaking the
lmk between the mother and child.'
1
Mr.
Russell's personal observation is supported to the
letter by the statement of the specialist in Soviet
education, Madame Leliana : ' we must remove
1
B. Russell, The Pl'actice and Theory of Bolshevism, p. 67.
the children from the baneful influence of the
family ; to put it plainly, we must nationalize
them. From the earliest days of their life they
must be reared in the beneficial atmosphere of
the Communist Kindergarten and school. The
task before us is to force the mothers to give up
their children to the Soviet State.' Occasionally
the Russian mother faced the horrors of the
Cheka, and protested vigorously. In April I921
the Soviet paper Rabotchaya Rania announced
that all the wives of the Soviet officials of the
town of Tver had gone on strike, repudiating all
marital and domestic duties, ' as a protest against
the deaths of eighty " nationalized children " in an
educational institution.' The Soviet Government
was, however, prompt in suppressing the gallant
women of Tver. The method chosen was
characteristic. The local Red Army Commandant
stationed soldiers in the houses of the officials, to
compel their wives to return to their duties.
From the point of view of technical education
the Soviet Children's Homes proved to be equally
lacking. M. Rykoff, the Soviet Prime Minister,
stated in I924 that ' the children's Homes
create tramps, who do not know what work is.'
1
Mter creating, during their autocratic rule of
eleven years, what is probably the greatest
aggregate of child misery and debauchery that
the world has ever witnessed, the executive of
the Soviet Government has now come to the
1
Pravda, August 23, 1924.
88
conclusion that a return to the laws of human
nature must be permitted. Accordingly a retreat
from the application of the Proletcult, ideal of
Communist education, has been sounded m regard
to the children ; and a return to the family system
has been carried out. State ' maintenance ' of
children is relinquished. It is admitted that the
system adopted in the ' Homes ' been. a
complete failure, and that it has contmually m-
creased the ranks of child criminals. To cleanse
the towns from this scandal it has been decided to
abandon the direct State maintenance of such '
children. Foster-parents were to be found among
the peasantry for the child inmates of the Soviet
'Homes.' Also the waif children were to be
rounded up ; it was estimated that 2 5 ,ooo would
be collected in Moscow alone. To induce the
peasants to adopt the children, gifts of additional
land where such was available, or a sum of money,
wer: offered to those who would take children.
No one family may adopt more than two
children.
It is to the peasant that the Soviet
is at last compelled to turn, when confronted w1th
the universal crime, debauchery, disease and death,
engendered by their educational ideals of the
Proletcult. The peasant, God-fearing and shrewd,
refused from the first to submit his children to the
experiments of the 'new learning.' He has left
the Government schoolhouses to fall into decay,
saying : ' Why should we thatch them ? We have
nothing to do with them.' The peasants have very
literally no use for these schools. But they are
quite alive to the need for education ; and they
will supply good remuneration to the wife of the
priest who teaches their children. The village also
institutes a severe boycott of the Communist
teacher. 'These teachers,' says the Government
official P. Smidovich, ' sent out to the villages,
after going through special anti-religious propa-
ganda and similar courses, were frequently boy-
cotted.' Things were made so unpleasant for
them that, in many cases, after holding the
Communist post for a few weeks, they found there
was nothing left for them to do but to return to
the town. 'The village,' laments P. Smidovich,
' is ruled by its own customary laws, to overthrow
which is beyond the strength of the authority of
instructors, and of zealous workers in the Com-
munist cause.' The peasants of Russia have
saved the children of the Russian villages.
A Ministry of Education which decrees that all
adults shall go to school for two hours daily is not
likely to neglect a close supervision over the
libraries used by the people. It was reported, in
1921, that 'the circulation of books is as carefully
controlled as the circulation of dangerous drugs.'
In the autumn of 1925, existing measures were
tightened up by a decree, issued to the provincial
and district authorities, giving instructions as to
the inspection of public libraries, and the ' removal
of counter-revolutionary, and inartistic, literature.'
Q
90
It was stated that previous instructions had not
been carried out satisfactorily ; and the new decree
enacted that more stringent measures be enforced.
The instructions referred especially to small
libraries in workers' clubs and in towns and
villages, and to travelling libraries. Among the
books to be removed were :-
( r) In the section of philosophy, psychology,
and ethics, ' all books written in the spirit of
idealistic philosophy.'
( 2) In the section of religion, all books on
religion, except those of an anti-religious
character.
(3) In the section on politics and sociology, all
books published by patriotic organizations.
(4) All propagandist of the
advocating a democratic repubhc, ctvtc
freedom, and universal suffrage.
(5) Reference books on law.
(6) Scientific books that speak' of the wisdom
of the Creator.'
An example of the application of this decree
is published in Pravda, November 1925. The
library of the Military School, Vystral, it was
announced, had been sold for pulp to a paper-mill.
This library included roo,ooo volumes, which had
been collected for over a century, and formerly
belonged to the Moscow Military College. It
contained valuable eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century books, as well as many complete editions
f Russian and foreign classics. Three years ago, in
January 1926, the Soviets were still waging war
upon the Immortals. In that month the Soviet
authorities sent urgent instructions to 120 libraries
in Leningrad to destroy all volumes of belles-
lettres, dating before 1917, which were out of
harmony with Communist doctrines. It was
ordered that the work of destruction be completed
by the middle of February; and careless or
evading librarians would be prosecuted. Prius
dementat.
The Government of Moscow has been compared
to that of the Mahomedan conquerors. It was a
great Caliph who ordered that all the books in the
world-famous library of Alexandria should be
burnt, since 'if these books approve the Koran
they are unnecessary and ought to be destroyed,
and if they oppose the Koran they ought also to
be destroyed.' In the same spirit the Soviet
Government orders the destruction of all books
not in harmony with the materialism of the
prophet of Communism, Karl Marx. It needs
the pen of Swift to do justice to the spectacle
of the angry zealots, enthroned in the Kremlin,
decreeing the extinction of the world's greatest
theologians, philosophers, lawyers, historians,
artists, musicians, in order that nothing may hinder
the spread of their newly devised Proletcult.
The apostles of the Proletcult, while aiming
chiefly at influencing the rising generation, did not
forget the need of recasting and controlling the
creative forces in science, art, and literature. The
new rulers contemned all that the leaders of
Russian thought who were no mean contributors
'to the treasury 'of European culture,' had valued
most highly. The result is well summed up by
Makeev: ' Their ideals, their literature, their art
were now denounced as the vile satisfactions of a
selfish taste, as bourgeois vices. Theirs was a
terrible dilemma : to prostitute their talent and
deny their gods, or to remain silent forever unl.ess
there was another escape. It is to the lastmg
credit of the Russian intelligentsia that, when the
choice had to be made, so very few renegades
were to be found in its midst. Those who were
able to escape the living death at home, and
abroad, could now endure penury and starvatiOn
with all the greater fortitude in that they at
least think, act, and produce freely. In this w.ay
Russia lost such vital forces as the authors Bumn,
Merejhkovski, Kuprin, Remizov, . Artzibashe.v;
musical composers such as Rachmamnoff, Stravm-
sky, Prokofiev ; and artists such as Somor,
Goucharova; and many scientists. The
savant is doing good work in the learne.d
tions and universities abroad, and Russian litera-
ture has not died out in exile.'
1
It is to the still
greater honour of these scien-
tists, who refused to prostitute their gifts to the
Proletcult, that they denied themselves the bene.fit
of the regulation which, under the Commumst
1 Makeev, Russia, 1925, p. 298.
regime, allows special clothing and food rations to
artists and others who are willing to do its bidding.
1
While the art, literature, and science of Russia
under the Soviet Government were thus taking
headlong flight to countries in which intellectual
freedom still existed, the section of the Proletcult
devoted to these creative activities was being
inaugurated in ' the forceful manner which had
been so successful in the political field.' Luna-
charsky was appointed Commissar for the Depart-
ments of science, art, music, literature, etc. A
convinced Communist was placed at the head of
each Department. No poetry or literature that is
not ' orthodox,' viz. of unalloyed Communist
doctrine, was allowed to reach the printing-press.
Unorthodox classics were recast. Thus, much
satisfaction was expressed in Moscow in 1925 by
the official issue of a book by M. F. Shipulinsky,
aimed at proving that Shakespeare's plays were
written, not by ' the capitalist and exploiter, the
illiterate Shakespeare, . . . but by a conspirator
and revolutionary, Roger Manners, Earl of
Rutland.'
Futurism became the officially recognized art of
the State and was given every support and en-
couragement, for three years. Futurists seized
every opportunity to shock the bourgeois, tramp-
ling on every tradition of art in the past. The
streets were filled with Futurist posters, and
were decorated by Futurist statues. The State
1 B. Russell, Ths PrtUtiu Mill Thsory of p. 4.5
94
publications and literature were full of vers libre.
But at last the proletariat itself began to revolt ;
and Lunacharsky felt compelled to withdraw his
experiment. ' Subsidies were withdrawn and
Futurism melted into thin air.' The relaxation of
the economic policy in I 92 I , by which some
private trading was allowed, brought back a certain
measure of initiative in publication; but the censor-
ship was still so severe that Russian writers found
that they were paying dearly for their decision to
remain under Soviet jurisdiction. They were
learning that ' the constant tutorship of the State
is killing the soul and spirit of the literary man.'
They found, as Sobol protested, that ' from every
writer the authorities expect a symbol of faith.
You must proclaim your faith in the proletariat of
all countries, or else you will be brought before the
censor.' The novelist Kasatkin has a striking
account of the efforts of the authors of the Prolet-
cult in the domain of creative work. ' The
October Revolution (I9I7) wholly banished the
famous dead, all the fathers and grandfathers of
Russian literature, in order to keep the proletarian
culture pure. But even the victorious storm of
Revolution could not destroy the law of literary
succession, the development of one from the other
. . . the mirage was put before us, it is still being
done, of the possibility of creating one single,
whole, indivisible, and constant proletarian culture .
. . . In consequence, on literary "fronts," even
the most "left," we see, walking about, naked
---------
kings, with an incredible conceit, affirming that
they are wearing the finest raiment.'
1
The artificial proletarian culture of the Soviet
Government, the Proletcult, divorced from religion
and from all moral standards, has proved to be a
sterile and unclean failure. The visionaries in
charge of the Soviet Ministry of Education have
admitted their failure, at the cost of the lives of
hundreds of thousands of children starved
' '
diseased, debauched; and perforce are returning
the child survivors of their State Homes and State
schools to the wise and tender care of the peasant.
These visionaries of Moscow have also learnt that
the great creative arts of literature and music can be
killed, but cannot be coerced. To-day Russian
literature and music, refusing to be killed, are
turning to the classic founts, the sources of in-
spiration that the Soviet rulers of Russia imagined,
in their blind self-conceit, that they had destroyed
for ever. The soul of Russia still lives, in her
villages, and in the streets of her towns. Her
creative genius still lives, in exile or in silence,
awaiting the recovery of that spiritual, intellectual,
and personal freedom which every month brings
nearer to her people.
1
Makeev and ~ Hara, Russia, p. 302 .
CHAPTER V
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND LIBERTY
' The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is unthinkable without
violence and terror.'
Lenin, Speech at Moscow, July 30, 1920.
T
HE frankly reactionary policy of the
Soviet Government in reviving the
religious persecutions discarded by all
progressive nations two hundred years ago, and
in making education subservient to a fanatical
political creed, are two salient characteristics
which must be given first place in a record of
the Soviet State. Under the Soviet rulers of
Russia no town -dweller can call his soul his
own ; neither can he educate his own childr'en
as he himself would desire. If the Soviet
Government had its way, moreover, spiritual and
intellectual freedom would be extinguished in all
countries. 'We must know how to hate,' writes
Lunacharsky, the Soviet Minister of Education
. '
' for only at this price can we conquer the universe
... the anti-religious campaign must not be .
restricted to Russia : it should be carried on
throughout the world.' And this is not merely an
individual expression of opinion. At a Govern-
ment Congress, held in May 1925,
1
one of the
principal aims of the Soviet Ministers was frankly
stated to be ' to fertilize proletarian movements in
1
The Third Soviet Congress of the U.S.S.R., May ao, 1925.
96
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND LIBERTY 97
other countries,'-in other words to extend to
world-wide dimensions that Dictatorship of the
Proletariat under which Russia has lost both free-
dom of conscience and freedom of mental develop-
ment. The' War on Heaven' and the educational
system of the Proletcult are searchlights on the
nature of that unique international power which is
now administering an area occupying one-sixth of
the surface of the globe. For freedom of con-
science, or freedom of thought, this power, evi-
dently, has no use. There remains the last of the
triple indefeasible rights of man, as a human being,
the right to freedom of the person. How has this
newly developed force in the history of Europe
dealt with the elemental human right to personal
freedom?
To give the correct answer to this question, it is
obvious that the first few months of the violent
acquisition of ' all power ' must not be taken as
typical of the new regime. As Lenin himself said,
there were moments when even that great architect
of revolution was by no means firmly seated in
the saddle; was, in fact, precariously hanging on
to the mane. Neither man nor movement is to be
judged when in that position.
But, by the autumn of 1920 the prolonged civil
war, the blockade of the Allies, and also the war
with Poland, were over. At this time, the state of
the country is described, by so impartial a
historian as Mr. Michael Farbman, as being
entirely peaceful : ' Soviet Russia was again at
peace.'
1
We will observe, therefore, the conditions
of personal freedom obtaining in the peaceful
Soviet Russia of 1921 and the succeeding years.
Before considering detailed accounts, it will be
useful to note the broad view of the personal
'freedom' of the Russian worker, in 1921, given
by Mr. Urquhart, the Chairman of the Russo-
Asiatic Consolidated Company. Mr. Urquhart
had to decide on the signing of a contract
with the Soviet Government for the resump-
tion of work on the Company's large mineral
properties in Russia. Here is no question of
political prejudice ; the point is one of mercantile
prudence. Mr. Urquhart concluded that no
conceivable contract would be immune from the
action, upon the workers, of the ' Extraordinary
Commission ' administered by the Soviet Minister
Felix Dzerjinsky, commonly known as the Cheka.
The Cheka he described briefly, in 1921, as being
accuser, judge, and jury; as having absolute
power of life and death ; and as keeping the
Russian people in a complete subjugation of
terror : ' Every phase of the individual activity of
the employer, his staff, and his workmen, even in
the privacy of their homes, would be under the
shadow and the menace of this terrorist organiza-
tion.' The absolute control exercised by the
Cheka over the Trade Unions, and even over
officials of the Government, would render any
contract inoperative.
1
Michael Farbman, After Lenin, p. 45
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND LIBERTY
99
Certainly, the acts of the Soviet Administration
during the year 1921 were not calculated to
reassure employers who might then be considering
the resumption of working contracts. In January
of this year, the Soviet Government issued a
decree warning all workmen on strike that unless
they returned to work immediately they would be
imprisoned for terms varying from one to five
years ; and that their families would be deprived
of food cards-in other words would be starved.
Here we see two principles of the Soviet Govern-
ment actually at work : the principle of the use of
hostages ; and the principle enunciated by Lenin
that the ' basis of all ' is the ' struggle for bread,'
i.e. that the ultimate instrument of power held
by the Soviet State is 'the bread monopoly.'
1
The use of hostages, and the use of compulsory
starvation, as instruments of coercion directed
against the workers, sounds oddly in a country
supposed to be governed by a' Workers' Republic,'
and to be enjoying ' entire peace.' Still less in
harmony with a peaceful regime are the official
statistics published in Moscow showing that
during the first ten days of this same month of
January 1921, 347 persons were executed, that is
rather over 30 per day ; and this list follows,
moreover, on the previous tally of 1 I 8 executions
during the latter part of December 1920. A few
weeks later, in February, the Chekas of Volhynia
and Podolia carried out ' mass executions ' ; and,
1 N. Lenin, Will the Bolshevi ks maintain Power i', pp. 57- 8, 85.
in March, 62 workmen were shot. In April the
s.s. Reshed Pasha arrived at Novorossisk from
Constantinople, with 2,500 passengers on board;
of these 7 50 were shot. In May, railwaymen on
strike on the Ekaterinoslav railway were sentenced
to five and six years' imprisonment with hard
labour, these sentences being commuted death
sentences, inflicted for the crime of striking.
In June came news of the imprisonment of
members of Co-operative Societies ; together
with the statement by Madame Stencel Lenskaya,
representing the Russian Co-operators, at the
International Co-operative Meeting at Copen-
hagen, that the Soviet Government had com-
pletely ' eliminated ' the Co-operative Movement
in Russia. By what stretch of imagination would
it be possible to conceive of an English Govern-
ment, of whatever political complexion, ' elimin-
ating 'the English Co-operators ? But these things
happen, to an accompaniment of summary arrests
and midnight shootings, in ' Soviet' Russia. In
this same month of June the Cheka of Moscow
shot 748 persons; the Cheka of Petrograd shot
216; that of Harkov, 418; that of Ekaterinodar,
3 1 ~ Thus four Chekas shot 1,697 persons, in
thzrty days, during a period of' entire peace.'
1
The hand of the Chekas dealt out compulsory
confiscations of personal property, under the
colloquialism of 'squeezing the bourgeoisie,' as
well as' mass executions.' It was Lenin who had
1
5. P. Melgounov, The Red T6rror, p. gz,
said, at the first Congress of Soviets in July 1917,
' We must grab the bourgeoisie more firmly, so
that they burst at all their seams.' In 1921 the
authorities of Ekaterinodar celebrated the anni-
versary of the Paris Commune by' grabbing' the
bourgeoisie with exemplary firmness. The usual
procedure was that special days would be set apart
for wholesale domiciliary visits. These visits
stripped the inhabitants of the bulk of their
clothing, linen, and other articles, and left them,
by way of clothing rations, merely a shirt apiece,
a couple of handkerchiefs, and so forth. When
this anniversary of the Commune was celebrated
at Ekaterinodar in 1921, all houses inhabited by
gentry (before the Revolution), and by doctors, or
professors, or engineers, were entered at nightfall
by Red Guards and Soviet officials, fully armed.
The whole house was searched ; all money and
valuables were removed ; and then the occupants
were ordered outside, in their indoor clothing,
without regard to age or youth or sickness (typhus
patients were haled out), and loaded on to wagons.
Half were taken to a concentration camp ; half
were sent to Petrovsk for forced labour in the
Caspian fisheries. This deportation of families,
and confiscation of their property, went on for a
day and a half.
1
In the autumn of this year the electoral freedom
of the Soviet State received a striking illustra-
tion. Elections were being held of delegates to the
1
Revolutsionnaya Rossia, Nos. r2, 13, 43
- - ---- - -
Petro grad Soviet, of which Zinovieff was President.
Just before the date of the election the Petrograd
Cheka arrested all the Social Democrats whose
addresses were known.
1
Thus does the Soviet
system simplify electoral contingencies.
At the close of the year the workers in the
Crimea were taught that it was not permitted under
a Soviet administration to buy bread, however
hungry one might be, unless sold by the Govern-
ment. On December 22 a steamer put in to
Sebastopol with 5oo tons of flour. The Sebastopol
Department of the Commissariat for Foreign
Trade could not afford to buy it. The dockers
asked permission from the Soviet officials to buy
the flour, and were given a blank refusal. Some
thousands of workers then gathered before the
Commissariat Office with placards : ' We demand
bread, peace, and freedom.' The Soviet officials
summoned cadets of the Red Army O.T.C., who
opened machine-gun fire on the workers. Fifteen
were killed and many wounded. The report
concludes : ' bread has gone up in Sebastopol from
3,ooo to 35,ooo roubles per lb. The workers are
facing starvation.' After the dockers, the railway-
men. Statistics of the Commissariat of Transport
showed that during the year 1921 the 'railway
courts ' shot, on their own responsibility, I ,759
persons--employees and passengers alike.
The peasants have suffered no less than the
other workers, under Soviet government. In the
1
Socialistichiski Viestnik, No. 21.
103
country districts detachments of armed Soviet
officials, calling themselves 'The Iron Broom,'
collected the grain taxes ; and ' often a peasant
was shut up, in cold storage, in an icy shed, or
taken out into the fields in winter, and tied to a
stake by Red Guards, who then poured a pail of
water over him, and gave him the choice of being
left to freeze to death, or of revealing his real, or
supposed, hidden store.' In 1921 the despair of
some of the Volga peasants burst out into an effort
to regain the freedom accorded to them by the
Revolution of March 1917. They paid a terrible
penalty. First the Red Army passed through the
villages, shooting in each village a hundred or more
inhabitants. ' Then, when they had gone, and we
thought that the bitterness of death was past,
came the Cheka, and the Revolutionary Tribunals ;
where the Red Army shot roo men and women,
they shot 300 ; and crazed by terror, neighbours,
friends, relatives, denounced each other in a mad
instinct of self-preservation.' In one concentra-
tion camp, that of Kozhonkov, near Moscow,
3 I 3 peasant hostages were interned ; during the
autumn of 1921 typhus raged in the camp, but
no winter clothing was allowed. Earlier in the
year a prison camp had been pitched at Kholmo-
gory, the final syllable of which was singularly
appropriate, as the shootings in this camp were
estimated at 8,ooo. Those who were not shot
perished slowly but surely of ill-treatment and
neglect. During this same year the Petrograd
prisons were apparently becoming overcrowded,
as 6oo persons, drawn from various jails, were
sent off to Kronstadt. At Kronstadt they were
loaded on to barges, which were then scuttled at a
spot where the water of the Neva is particularly
deep.
In speaking of restrictions of personal liberty in
Soviet Russia, by arbitrary and wholesale im-
prisonment, it is necessary to know what the
prisons of the Soviet Government are like.
The famous Lubyanka, the great prison of the
Cheka in Moscow, ' the best-known building
in Soviet Russia,' has been very fully described,
from personal experience of its cells, and torture
rooms, and execution chamber, by George
Popoff.
1
A contributor to Izvestia has given a
vivid description of his own experiences, after a
year of Soviet rule, during a personal enquiry in
Petrograd.
2
In the Tanganka Prison of Petrograd
the cells were choked with typhus and fever
patients, without bedding of any kind, and with no
attendants. The prisoners' linen had not been
washed for two months ; they were a
living death from vermin. In this prison there
were over one thousand sick and hunger-stricken
victims, many of whom were awaiting enquiry into
their cause of arrest. The Governor of this prison
estimated that 40 per cent of the deaths among
the prisoners under his ' care ' were due to lack of
1 G. Popoff, The Cheka, 1925.
2
Izvestia, December 4, 1918.
food. In February 1922 the Vyborg Prison, also
in Petrograd, contained ' horrible shadows rather
than human beings. All day long the place
resounds with the moans of people dying of
hunger.'
1
This was not in the famine year. The
cells of the Cheka prison in Garokhovaya Street,
Petrograd, were absolutely windowless, and
measured 7 feet by J! feet. In 1922 Madame
Samarodova, of the Social Revolutionary Party,
was imprisoned for a month in a vault that had no
window at all. In Baku industrial workers lay
crowded with professional men in cellars, with-
out any windows and suffocating with stench.
2
Madame R. M. Y ondovicha, who was banished to
the region of Dvinsk, experienced similar condi-
tions in the transport prisons of V ologda and
Viatka, in this year of' entire peace ' of 1921, and
after the Soviet Government had enjoyed un-
fettered power in administration for four years :-
' It was late at night when we reached the transport
prison at Vologda, and the staff met us with obscene
abuse, before stripping us of most of our belong-
ings, down to the few spoons and cups which
seemed to us so precious in our desperate, helpless
flight. In the female ward, in almost total dark-
ness, 35 or 40 half-dead, half-alive creatures were
crawling about, over a mass of filthy, disgusting
mud, between walls plastered over with excretions
and other nastinesses. Morning brought yet
H
1
Revolutsionnoye Dielo, February 1922.
Revolutsionnaya Rossia, Nos. 33, 34
ro6 RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
another horror in the shape of the food, when we
prisoners had served to us some fish in a state of
putrefaction-not even gruel was issued. This
prison of Vologda was a central prison, and there-
fore exiles passed through it, in a continuous stream
and from every quarter of Russia. In the kitchens
the utensils were never washed, and the dirt and
the food were all cooked together in the boilers,
holding a foul, greasy, permanently simmering
mess of" soup." At Viatka the women, stretched
on the floor of the female ward, had mere tatters of
garments and some were practically nude. Never
have I spent a night of horror to equal that first
night of mine at Viatka, for in addition, the room
swarmed with vermin, and constantly my com-
panions kept moaning and tossing in their sleep
or begging water, as the majority of them were
sickening for fever. When morning came seven-
teen of them had developed typhus ; but they
were not removed to hospital. At eight o'clock
our " soup " was brought. It consisted of putrid
chunks of horse-head, some scraps of horse-hair
and hide, some rags, and morsels of a s9rt of
jelly-like substance, all floating about together in a
dark-coloured, evil-smelling liquid. With it went
unpeeled potatoes. Yet upon this horrible con-
coction the women threw themselves with a
perfectly animal avidity, and gulping it down,
proceeded to fight even for the potato skins, before
within a few minutes, in not a few cases, vomiting.
And so the day dragged on, and in time was
replaced with the horrors of the night.'
1
Since the
close of I922, deportations have taken place from
Moscow to the Portaminsk prison camp, on the
shores of the Arctic Ocean. Here there is neither
cooking nor heating apparatus (in the Arctic) ;
very little drinking water ; and no medical
attendance. Out of 5 ,ooo prisoners in the Arch-
angel prison camp in I922, only I ,soo were alive
at the end of the year. A year later, in I923, a
passenger on a Norwegian boat was able to observe
this prison camp, as it is placed close to the quay.
He noticed the pitiful state of the prisoners, due to
semi-starvation and exhaustion. One day a
steamer arrived for a transfer of some of the
prisoners. They were loaded 'like any dead
cargo on board the steamer. Many of them were so
weak as to be unable to stand, and were carried up
the gangway, and dumped down in a dark hold
among their unfortunate fellows.'
In I 92 3 the island of Solovetsky was added to
the prison areas of the Soviet Government. e ~ e
over two hundred prisoners have been kept, m
abject misery, and at the mercy of officials
who are all ex-criminals, being chiefly Cheka
employees convicted of offences against the
Soviet code, or the rules of the Cheka. There
is no power of complaint for the prisoners,
who can be made to work I4 hours a day, are
flogged, and are thrust into stone cells. The
political prisoners, of whom there are over 200,
S. P. Melgounov, The Red Terror.
are in a building made to accommodate 70. Here,
also, there is no medical attendance. For eight
of the year Solovetsky is in complete
tsolatton from the world. Official reports mention
' mass floggings,' not infrequently ending in death.
In a special area of Solovetsky is the ' Kremlin,'
where are felons, counter-revolutionaries, and
Here merciless floggings take place ;
m summer prisoners are exposed naked until they
are covered with mosquito bites ; they are also
put for seven days at a time into cells which have
no light and are too small to allow the inmate to
lie down ; and in winter they are put into a tower
the walls of which are coated with ice. The
women, moreover, whatever their upbringing, are
compelled to comply with the ' demands ' of
the officials. The conditions in Solovetsky are
those of starvation, torture, assault, and outrage ;
and were unmitigated in I924, the year when the
English Trade Union Delegation in Moscow was
embracing members of the Soviet Government
and assuring English workers that Soviet
was the 'hope of the workers of the world.'
1
If
Dr. Nansen has not exhausted his philanthropic
activity, a relief expedition to the prisons and
c?ncentration camps of Soviet Russia would give
htm ample scope ; and there would be little
difficulty in raising international funds for the
succour of perhaps the most miserable sufferers on
1
One member of the delegation, Mr. Ben Turner, made valiant
efforts to go to Solovetsky, but was t old by t he Moscow authorities
that the weather was not suit able for t ravelling.
the face of the earth. During the year I927,
prelates of the Orthodox Church were sent to
the Solovetsky settlement.
To return to the year of peace, I921 . It was a
year made notable in the records of the administra-
ti.on of the Soviet Government by the issue of a
?Y the Central Cheka, under Dzerjinsky,
authonzmg the use of the ' old and proved
remedy ' for compelling prisoners to give informa-
tion- the method of torture. The Cheka of
Mos.cow emphasized this circular by licensing an
official to continue the inquisitorial tortures for
which he had been reported by less thorough-
going colleagues. It is not necessary to enumerate
the varieties of torture employed by
the mnumerable Chekas distributed throughout
Russia ; each is revolting in its deliberate and
fiendish cruelty ; and the evidence for these
official practices is both abundant and incontest-
able.1 It is interesting to note that, far from torture
no used when peace descended upon
Sovtet Russia, the Cheka of Simferopol invented in
this year I 92 I two new tortures. One of these was
the injection into the. rectum of an enema of
powdered glass ; the other is too obscene for
description.
2
The Soviet Minister responsible for
the whole Cheka organization, Dzerjinsky, subse-
quently assumed higher office in the Soviet Govern-
.
1
Full evidence of t hese methods of Dzerjinsky's administration
wlll be found m T he Cheka, Popoff, and The Red Terror, S. P.
Also m the official bulletins of the Cheka.
2
Dtelo, June 27, 1921.
ment. It is to the honour of the American people
that America has steadfastly refused recognition of
a Government committed to a system of massacre
and torture hitherto unknown in any civilized
country. If these and other facts had been fully
known to the people of England, their decision
as to the continuance during ten years of the
occupancy of Chesham House by representatives
of the Soviet power would have been swift and
conclusive.
The conditions of popular freedom in the second
peaceful year, that of I922, are full of interest for
the student of Sovietism in action. In the first
three months of the year 4,300 prisoners were
shot, of which number 34 7 were executed in
Moscow. There were ' mass shootings ' in Yaro-
slavl, Saratov, Kazan, and Kursk. In January
there was a regrettable incident at Kiev, where one
of the female officials of the Cheka shot So prisoners
by mistake. At Proskurovo, on January IS, I922,
23 persons were shot. A resident in the town
wrote to a friend : ' Be thankful you have got
clear of Proskurovo. At least you have escaped h
spectacle of wives, and mothers, and children
waiting outside the Cheka buildings, on execution
days.' Between February 28 and March 5, 2,500
sailors of the garrison of Petrograd were shot, on
the ice of the frozen Neva, in front of the fortress-
prison of Petropaulo. The newspaper published
under the name of the Revolutionary Cause, the
Revolutsionnoye Dielo, of March of this year,
III
gives a striking account of the execution of 6o
persons at Petrograd : ' The shootings took place
at a station on the Trinovskaya Railway. The
prisoners were taken out at dawn, and told to
dig their own graves. When the graves were half-
dug they were told to strip, and were pushed into
the holes and fired upon, one lot being pushed
upon the top of the previous lot, till all the shallow
graves were filled with dead and groaning.'
1
The
Cheka Department, now renamed the State
Political Department, or Gosudarstvennoe Politi-
cheskoe Upravlenie, and known henceforth as the
O.G.P.U., issued statistics for the shootings in
April and May; the total was I ,Io8. On the
night of May 7, I 64 were shot, including I 7 priests.
In August of this year the present head of the
Soviet Government, Stalin, observed that it might
become needful' to resort to terrorism.'
In June I922 the trial took place, at Moscow,
of 47 Social Revolutionaries. The distinguished
Belgian statesman, lawyer, and Socialist, M.
Vandervelde, defended the prisoners ; and his
speech was confiscated by the Moscow police, at
all bookstalls and newsagents'. The judges were
not lawyers, but three leading Communists; and
tactics employed at other times were used also in
this case, to stimulate popular feeling, resolutions
being forced by the Government from towns
throughout Russia, demanding the death penalty.
In August of this year, I922, detailed statistics
1 Revolutsionnoye Dielo, March 24, 1922.
Il2
were published of the numbers executed by the
Soviet Government, by means of the Cheka,
during the four years of their power. It is signifi-
cant that the list is headed by peasants.
Peasants
Intellectuals
Soldiers
Workmen
Officers.
Police .
Landowners
Doctors . .
Professors and Teachers
Priests .
815,100
355,250
26o,ooo
192,350
54,65o
59,000
12,950
8,8oo
6.755
1,243
It was officially reported, in the following month
of this year of complete peace, that I ,96o,ooo
political offenders were in prison, a figure which
did not include the prisons of Turkestan and of the
Caucasian Republics. At Odessa a batch of
executions was the method adopted to break a
local strike. The futility of judicial appeals in
Soviet Russia is illustrated by an official record of
the shooting during I922 of 5I9 political prisoners
and 303 other prisoners pending their appeals.
During this year six prisoners succeeded in
escaping from the concentration camp at Ekaterin-
burg. The Director of Penal Labour proceeded
to the camp, from Moscow, selected 25 prisoners,
and shot them out of hand ' as a warning to the
rest.' A few months previously Dzerjinsky
claimed, in an official memorandum, that the
Cheka ideal was ' vested with an integrity of
crystal spotlessness. '
1
Lenin was less afraid to
acknowledge the truth-' for every hundred decent
members of the Chekas there are ninety-nine
rogues.'
The organization of the Cheka does not control
the freedom of the individual merely by the
intimidation of torture and death. Doubtless the
knowledge, among the ' broad masses of the
people,' of the existence, in every town and many
villages, of a Cheka building, with its bloodstained
cellar, the scene of its ' questionings ' and execu-
tions, and its terrible burying-ground where the
bodies of the dead bear eloquent witness of the
tortures employed, has cowed the whole population
of Russia. A Government system such as the Cheka
could have but two results : paralysing fear, or the
rising of the whole people intent on sweeping
away the terror from their midst. The Moscow
Government took two precautions against the
latter possibility. It instituted, throughout Russia,
the use of hostages ; and it created a marvellously
efficient spy organization. The full Government
approval of the use of the practice of hostage-
seizure appears from the following recommenda-
tion issued by Dzerjinsky himself, in a localized
edition of Izvestia published at Kiev on March I,
I9I9 : ' It would be well if all Social Revolution-
aries now in custody were converted into hostages,
and made to serve as guarantees for the good
1 Dzerjinsky, Memorandum of February 17, 1922.
behaviour of their respective wings of the Social
Revolutionary Party.' Both the hostage and the
spy systems have been in full operation in the
years since the conclusion of the civil war. In
June 1921 an order issued by the Plenipotentiary
Committee of the Soviet Central Executive
Commission, the concluding words of which were,
' Let this order be carried out with the most
ruthless severity,' required that ' the decree
authorizing seizure of hostages shall be read to all
villages guilty of concealing arms, and hostages
shall be seized and shot, unless the arms first be
handed over.'
1
That these decrees and order were
' ruthlessly carried ' out would not be doubted by
those who knew the previous records of the
Soviet Government in regard to hostages. Thus,
to give but one or two examples, in the preceding
year a whole family of hostages was shot at
Elizabetgrad, consisting of four children three to
seven years of age, and their grandmother, aged
69; and in the same town in 1921, 36 hostages
were killed. During the years 1921 and 1922,
3 13 peasant hostages were placed in the prison
camp of Kozhonkov, including children whose ages
ranged from infants of a month to boys and girls
of sixteen. Typhus raged in this camp. Hostages
were seized by the thousand in 1921, after the
unavailing protest of the Kronstadt sailors. The
famous Russian revolutionary Kropotkin was
1
Za Narod, 'For the People.' No. I. The order was issued on
June II, 1921.
115
moved to protest against this official system in an
eloquent appeal to the Soviet Government :
' Have you not a single member sufficiently honest
to remind his comrades that such measures
constitute a return to the worst period of the
Middle Ages, and demean a people undertaking to
construct a new order of society? For we have
come to a pass that a man rruty be imprisoned, not
in punishment for any definite crime, but merely
that you may be able to hold over your opponents
the threat of his death. Is that not as though
each morning you were to take a man to the
scaffold and then to take him back to prison again
and say, "Wait-not to-day!" Do you not
realize that such things are a throw-back to the
system of torture, and to a system which tortures
not only the prisoner, but his relatives ? '
1
The Soviet system of espionage might also be
accurately described as a system of torture
inflicted on the innocent. The spies of the Cheka,
alias the Ogpu, are everywhere in Russia ; and
their activities extend throughout Europe and the
East. A usual method of recruiting their ranks
is to arrest girls and youths, women accustomed to
the comforts of life, and the servants of foreigners.
Then, under threat of death, they are released to
act as spies. Well-educated daughters of the
Russian middle or upper classes, who thought
they might safely attend dances or musical parties
at foreign Missions, have frequently been un-
1 Na Chouzhoi Staronye, No. 3
/
II6
deceived in regard to the illusion that any action in
Soviet Russia is safe. They would be suddenly
arrested at night, to the despair of their parents,
and brought to the dreaded Lubyanka Prison, in
a state of collapse from panic. Three days of
solitary confinement would follow ; then in the
small hours of the morning-it is the habit of
the Cheka to exercise its predatory activities during
the hours which civilized men and women reserve
for sleep-they would be brought before a tribunal
of three men, and accused of complicity in a plot.
Then they would be given the option of acting as
a spy in the particular foreign Mission they had
been accustomed to visit, with the duty of making
a weekly report. If refusal met these proposals
then the arrest of parents, sisters, friends, would
be carried out, till the victims, half-crazed with
fear for the lives of those dearest to them, at last
submitted. The victims of this system are
generally women typists, teachers, governesses,
humble maids-of-ali-work, cooks, chauffeurs,
clerks, students, and professors. Sometimes the
unhappy man or woman ' will disappear for a few
days. Then they come back looking very white
and explain that they have been ill. Sometimes
the truth comes out in a flood of tears.'
1
One subtle and valuable result of this system is
' the profound suspicions of one another which
divide all the Russian enemies of Bolshevism.'
A resident in Pskov wrote in May 1921 : 'Life
1
Russia To-day, 1 923. p. 12.
here is terrible. Spies swarm like ants ; they
to be found in every house, in every m
every street. It is as though we were hvmg m a
prison. Each man is afraid of the other! and
brother looks askance at brother.'
1
There IS not
'a sphere of life which the Cheka does not watch,'
wrote the well-known Cheka official, Moroz. In
order that the responsibility of the Soviet Govern-
ment for what has been well called a
system may be clearly understood-a
bility shared by all the o.f the Soviet
Government, including those given fnendly recog-
nition in European countries and at Geneva, such
as Tchitcherin and Litvinov-it will be to
quote in full an official document of 1922, entitled
' Duties of Secret Agents ' for January of that year :
' All agents shall ( 1) keep under observation
managements of factories, and educated workers
in the same, and make sure of
political opinions, and any. . or
propaganda against the Soviet pohce which
such persons may engage. (2) any
gathering purporting to have been .orgamzed for
amusement (card playing and
in reality for other ends, and If possible .m
such gathering, and report to the authontles Its
real purpose and aims, and the names and sur-
names and addresses of all present. (3) Keep
under surveillance all educated employees of
1 Roussky Courier, May 1921.
II8 RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
Soviet institutions, and note their conversation
and discover their political views, and where they
spend their leisure, and in short communicate to
the authorities any suspicious details. (4) Attend
all intimate or family gatherings of an educated
class, discover their trend of opinion, and learn
who have been their organizers, and why they have
been organized at all. (5) Watch for the holding
of any communication between educated persons
and the intelligentsia of a given district, and
persons at home or abroad, and report upon the
same accurately, and fully.'
1
An espionage document of even greater interest
is the circular issued by Dzerjinsky in March 1923,
at a time when this Soviet Minister was People's
Commissar for the Interior (Home Secretary) as
well as head of the Ogpu (Cheka). This circular
states that all the foreign secret agents of the
Cheka are in future to be formed into a special
branch, with foreign sections in the leading foreign
towns. This branch was to form part of the Com-
missariat of the Interior, and be under the
Assistant Commissary for Home Affairs, Comrade
Medvedkoff. The London section was placed
under Comrade Hoffman, and was given a special
staff of secret agents, and an annual grant of
ro,ooo. If this sum should prove to be in-
sufficient it was to be supplemented by special
credits, drawn from various sources, including the
1
Golos Rossii , April r6, 1922.
Soviet Trade Delegation. The Soviet Trade
Delegation, under the name of Arcos, occupied,
as all Londoners know, palatial buildings of a
rental estimated at 4o,ooo per annum, in Moor-
gate Street ; it was also nominally installed in the
late Russian Embassy, Chesham House, Belgravia.
A further recommendation from Dzerjinsky was
that posts in the consular service should be given
to agents of the Cheka : ' The Commissariat of
the Interior considers it extremely desirable that
agents of the State Political Department (Cheka)
should be given posts on the Soviet Consular
Service in foreign countries, as this would enable
them more easily to get into touch with Russian
political refugee circles, and with persons desiring,
for one reason or another, to visit Soviet Russia.'
Later information, that acquired by a personal
visit to Russia by Mr. H. J. Greenwall, and
published in an uncensored despatch in the Daily
Express of September 14, 1927, gives a vivid
account of the espionage under Soviet rule. Of
the members of the G .P. U., Mr. Green wall says :
' a man never knows when he may be talking to
one. The conductor of a tram-car, your floor
waiter, the barber, most certainly one of the hotel
hall-porters, any or all of these people may be
employees of the dreaded Cheka or G.P.U.
" When I hear a car stop outside our house at
night I am in a state of terror till it moves on,"
said a young woman . . . to me the other day.
In the French Revolution people marked down by
the " Committee of Public Safety " were taken to
the guillotine in a tumbril. In Russia the G.P.U.
fetches them in a motor-car, and has them shot in a
cellar. That is all the difference.'
These documents justify the claim that the
terrorism exercised over all Russians to-day,
whether in Russia or abroad, is a carefully thought
out system and one which ' pursues collective
murder like a business.' The practice of killing
hundreds and thousands of innocent hostages-
' the Soviet authorities admit to having shot Soo
hostages to avenge the attempt on the life of Moses
Uritzki, the chief executioner of the Cheka '-
may be, as Professor Sarolea says,' a hideous return
to savagery.' But it is wonderfully efficient, and is
based on a profound knowledge of human nature.
The O.G.P.U., writes a privileged observer of its
methods, ' shows a diabolical cunning in the
utilization . . . of every laudable human instinct
-maternal love, conjugal love, filial love, friend-
ship, gratitude, reverence. To find anything
worse than the 0 . G .P. U. one must go a long way
back into medieval history.' Incidentally, this is
precisely what officials of the O.G.P.U. have
done. The medieval custom of socage was revived
by the Petrograd order-that the peasants must give
100 days, annually, of forced labour to the Govern-
ment, before they could work for a private em-
ployer. Also, utilizing a knowledge of ancient
Norse history, these medievalists have revived a
torture used by the early rulers of Norway-
that of introducing into the body of the victim a
live rat which remains alive for -the few moments
needed for it to gnaw its way out. Ancient and
modern indeed join hands, when the funds needed
for financing the representatives of the Cheka in
England have been augmented by means of the
exquisitely appointed range of modern offices
occupying the great building which was owned
by 'Arcos' in Moorgate Street.
The statistics of shootings, continued through
the years 1923, 1924, and 1925, may be briefly
indicated, in proof that the use of terrorism by the
Soviet Government is an established characteristic
of Soviet administration. And it is interesting to
preface the list with a resolution of the Prresidium
of the Soviet Central Executive Committee,
adopted on February 15, 1923. This resolution
forbids the infliction of the death penalty by
' simplified methods ' of taking the life of the con-
demned, 'which are universally practised at
present, more especially in the outlying districts
of the Republic, where barbarous methods of
killing criminals are being applied.' In future
executions are to be carried out only by shooting.
The 'simplified methods,' universally practised,
included throwing into boiling water, flaying alive,
burying alive, and crucifixion. It will be noticed
that nothing is said as to the prohibition of question-
ing by the' old and tried' method of torture.
In the first two months of 1923 the Petrograd
Cheka reported the shooting of 212 persons in that
122
city. The Ogpu reported 866 executions in
January, February, and March. A case of
international interest was that of the artist Cherni-
koff, the author Bergeo, and a son of Professor
Ospensky, who were all three condemned to death
for founding a branch of the Theosophical Society
known as' The Order of the Flaming Heart.' A
death sentence was also accorded to the very
distinguished economist of Petrograd University,
Professor Raffalovitch. The sentence was antici-
pated by Professor Raffalovitch, who committed
suicide in his cell in the Spalernaya prison.
Private trading is, of course, still a penal offence in
Soviet Russia except under Government regula-
tions ; and two Commissars were condemned to
death for' fostering private trade,' and themselves
engaging in such trade. During the first nine
months of 1923, the records of the Commissariat
of Justice show the number of persons sent to hard
labour, in Siberia, as 72,658. Of these, 40 per
cent were registered as peasants or workmen.
1
A
significant arrest for Englishmen thinking of
visiting Russia occurred in January 1924. An
English teacher named Berro! was on his way to
the offices of the British Mission in Moscow, with
a letter, when he was arrested in the street and
taken to the Butyrka Prison. In the middle of
February, Mr. Berro! was removed from his cell;
and four weeks later it was reported that he had
not been heard of since. Such disappearances
1 George Popoff, The Cheka, p. 247
~ ~
among Russians are a commonplace of life in
Soviet Russia; thus a report from Kiev for 1924
says : 'the present shootings are endless, but
things are now done more circumspectly than
formerly was the case. An inhabitant of Tambov
would be sent to be examined in Saratov, or a
Saratovian would be sent elsewhere, and so forth,
so that all tracks may be covered up, and on a
given person disappearing no one may be able to
find him again.' Another illuminating record of
the recent cases is that of the five unemployed who
were given death sentences for having ' promoted
disturbances in factories and cessations from
industrial work. '
1
The inflicting, by the Soviet Government, of the
death penalty on strikers throws into bright relief
the courageous act of the miners of Atbaksara,
when M. Jacobson was shot by sentence of the
Soviet Tribunal of Omsk on August 12, 1924, for
the offence of having written to the former
English owners of the mines, with an account of
ruinous conditions brought about by bad manage-
ment. The letter was intercepted ; and the death
sentence duly carried out. M. Jacobson left a
wife and five children utterly destitute. The
miners thereupon gallantly ~ c e d death themselves
by declaring a three days' protest strike.
Executions during the year 1925 include
1
Dni, January 24, 1924. During the years 1923 and 1924
the Cheka developed a new form of activity in the creation of
Communist fighting detachments' in foreign countries. George
Popoff, The Cheka, p. 247
members of factory committees, during the
extensive strikes in the Central Urals, who were
shot without trial during a strike movement
involving 1oo,ooo workmen ; and the shooting of
58 persons without trial, by the Petrograd Cheka,
on or about July 3, including the last Prime
Minister of Russia under the old regime, the aged
Prince Galitzin, who was earning his living as a
shoemaker in Moscow; and also Baron Fredericks,
an old man of 90, unable to walk. This year, it
may be noted, was ushered in by an 'orgy of
shooting,' without any form of public trial.
Recent years are notable, also, for widespread
deportations and arrests. Thus in November
1925 an official account states that 3,ooo persons
were arrested in Moscow, in a single night,
and banished to remote districts. During the
summer of 1925, reports came of an intensified
use of terrorism ; and the many banishments
to Siberia have included old and feeble women.
If it were not for the horrors of the Cheka it
would be pleasant to speak of a humorous note
in Soviet annals, in the arrest, at a concert, held
in Moscow, of ' the occupants of the four front
rows of the stalls, who were arrested en masse, the
object being to find out where they had obtained
money to pay for their expensive seats.' A few
months before this ' mass arrest ' it was reported
that the Transcaucasian Cheka had of late made
much use of the ' wreath of death,' an iron strap
with which the living victim's head is encircled.
The ' wreath ' is fitted at the ends with an iron nut
and screw, by which the head is increasingly
compressed.
1
The Cheka of Odessa also showed
its zeal by devising, recently, a new method of
execution. The condemned man was made to
walk along a dark passage with a cavity at the end ;
the executioners fired on him from embrasures in
the walls when he fell into the pit, and thus they did
not see his face. Doubtless this Cheka of Odessa
was highly commended for so ingenious a device.
At one time during 1925 there were 1,500 persons
imprisoned in a single concentration camp-that of
Minsk ; and in June of this year a police report
notified the confinement of 9o,ooo persons in
Soviet prisons, camps, and 'other places.' Of
this number 89,000 had had no kind of trial,
having been arrested by order of the Administra-
tion. Of these 9o,ooo, 40 per cent were workmen,
28 per cent intelligentsia, 17 per cent peasants,
2 per cent ' socially dangerous persons '-presum-
ably criminals-and 10 per cent ' old counter-
revolutionaries.' It appears, therefore, that four
years ago the Soviet rulers found themselves
compelled to keep 9o,ooo workmen and others in
confinement, for hostility to the Soviet Govern-
ment. Is it surprising that the Russian workers,
when not talking to order for the benefit of foreign
Labour Delegations, say that the Soviet rule is
' not a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dic-
tatorship over the proletariat ? '
In the spring of 1926 the fury for massacre,
which inspired the Soviet rule in the early days
of the Revolution, recurred in Southern Russia.
Hundreds were shot, in one fortnight, in the
1
Dni , May 13, 1923. Socialistichesky Vestnik, No. 15.
Black Sea districts, including 90 prisoners; and
over 100 sailors were arrested. At Voronesh
detachments of O.G.P.U. (Cheka) troops opened
fire on a crowd of worshippers at S. Mary's
Cathedral, killing 9 and wounding 15. In May
there were 12,ooo prisoners incarcerated in the
prison island of Solovetsky ; political prisoners
were then confined, to the number of 7 or 8, in one
small cell ; the prison guards were all men de-
ported for various offences ; no new clothes were
given, and as the heavy work given to prisoners
wears out their elothing, many die of the cold of
the Arctic winter ; the food was very bad ; floggings
were frequent ; and many prisoners were shot. Is
the Howard Society no longer in existence, or
does it now function only in the comfortable
security of England ?
The year 1927 is memorable in the record of
Soviet executions for the sensation caused in
England, among a public very imperfectly aware
of the constant use, by the Soviet power, of in-
dividual and mass shootings, by the execution
without trial of 20 prisoners, on June 9, as a
reprisal for the death of Voikoff, a participant in
the massacre of the Russian Royal Family. This
reprisal shocked the members of the English
Labour Party, and of the left wing of that party, the
Independent Labour Party, who had apparently
been living in a fool's paradise as regards the
habitual methods of Soviet administration. Their
protest, however, tactfully omitted to state that
one of the 20 victims, a Finn, Colonel Elevengren,
according to Reuter, while still alive was taken' to
the mortuary vault of the prison, where he was
chained to a corpse, and so left for five days.'
Towards the end of June 1927, shootings were
reported in Leningrad, Moscow, Krasnoyarsk,
Zhitomir, Kiev, Tiflis, Minsk, Saratov, Kzylorda,
and Harkov; and it was observed that' any Moscow
or provincial newspaper, taken at random, now
records daily numerous death sentences and execu-
tions.' It was at a Congress held in Moscow in this
year that Krylenko, the Soviet Public Prosecutor,
announced that over 2,ooo,ooo persons had been
thrown into prison within a year. Prisons were
filled to overflowing, and everywhere churches
and monasteries were being rapidly converted
into jails.
In this same month a passenger from Vladivos-
tok was able to give the Scotsman a vivid illustration
of the Soviet way with strikers : ' The men at the
docks gave notice that unless they got better
conditions they would go on strike. An O.G.P.U.
official came down when they stopped work, and
read them a Bolshevik decree, in which it was said
that if they were not back within an hour, every
tenth man would be shot. Within fifteen minutes
the men had all resumed. '
1
After the ' Arcos '
raid in London in May 1927, some soo persons
were put to death, and over 2,000 were arrested.
In July, 88 lamas were condemned to long
terms of imprisonment at Verkne V dinsk, near
the Mongolian frontier : an illustration of the
Soviet official hostility to all religion. The
lamas were indicted for ' opposing the Soviet
1 Observer, June 6, 1927.
decree disqualifying merchants and priests from
administrative positions, and nationalizing the
Buddhist monasteries.' During the last fortnight
of I927 the activities of the Ogpu fell heavily upon
the peasants, I0,407 having been arrested in the
seven provinces of Central Russia. In March I928
the Ogpu executed 52 persons in three days,
between March 20 and 2 3. This is some I 7 per
day.
The immediate question that rises to the lips of
an Englishman, with a thousand years of hard-won
liberty at his back, is, how comes it that the
Russian people have not swept this unclean
monster of an Ogpu, or Cheka, out of existence ?
The reply is that the first few months of the
coup d'etat, under the mighty general-
ship of Lenin, gave all communications and all
publications into the hands of the Soviet Govern-
ment, where they have remained ; therefore
action by the people of Russia is, as yet,
Impossible. And, further, the Ogpu or Cheka is
not only an organization of fiendishly cruel
The Ogpu has ample and
highly d1sc1phned troops for its own service, and
even executions fail to inspire
obedience, machme-gun fire is successful. A
description of the Government and Cheka head-
9uarters in Moscow in I 92 3, at a date when
peace had been established for two years,
IS an eloquent explanation of the apparent inertia
of the Russian people: 'The Chon (Cheka)
troops guard the Kremlin from street revolution
and occupy all the points of advantage, round
Kremlin and the Lubyanka. A thousand are in
the Kremlin ; and one thousand are in the
Sofieskaya Podvarnaya (formerly an hotel) on the
Moscow River, opposite to the Kremlin ; a third
battalion is near the Kremlin ; a fourth battalion
is off Arhat Square ; and three other battalions are
in the centre of Moscow. The notorious head-
quarters of the Cheka, now the Ogpu, on the
Lubyanka are surrounded by these picked troops,
z,ooo of which are in this district. Probably no
Government has ever made such a scientific study
of the problem of suppressing a street revolution on
the part of the oppressed proletariat as the Soviet
Government has done.'
Zinovieff has declared that ' a most cruel and
unrelenting Communist Dictatorship of the pro-
letariat will be maintained in Russia,' and that,
' under no circumstances will the Communist
Party relax its" iron grip "on the Russian people,'
until the consummation of the World Revolution.
1
Zinovieff himself fell under the iron grip in
I927; but the system still endured. The record of
the Soviet Government during its ten years of
autocratic power, in regard to personal freedom,
is a record for which history has no parallel.
It is well summed up by the Spanish Syndicalist
and Communist leader, Angelo Pertano, who
went to Moscow as a delegate, hoping to find a
workers' paradise. What he did find was ' a state
of misery far worse than any tyranny hitherto
known .... Never in the days of Tsarism did
the Russian workmen suffer such an appalling and
J Pravda, May 8, 1923.
degrading yoke as the Soviet one. The freedom
of striking is abolished now ; during my stay at
Tula Arsenal there were about 30 men punished
for strikes, including eight men under penal
servitude for striking . . . the Russian proletariat
is reduced literally to the state of irresponsible
animals. '
1
Members of the Labour Party, Demo-
crats, and Syndicalists, are of one mind in this
regard. Colonel Wedgwood, no insignificant
representative of the ' advanced ' wing of the
Labour Party in the House of Commons, declared,
on returning from a visit to Soviet Russia, that the
order maintained there is ' the order of brute
beasts,' and added that the present dictatorship is
as great a tyranny as was that of the Tsars. The
Secretary of the British Miners' Federation, Mr.
Frank Hodges, finds the Soviet Government not
only the negation of personal freedom, but also
the negation of democratic freedom : ' The
So;ie.t is cast-iron system, originating in an
Asiatic mmd, and contrary to the spirit of

And, as Trotzky has told us, this
mternatwnal Soviet system, ruling now over so
great a part of the globe, is very willing to enter,
by stratagem or by force, through the gates of
into the possession of the remaining
countnes of the world. To hold the gate is the
first task, to-day, of the free democracies of all
nations.
1
70 Days in U.S.S.R., by Angelo Pertano. Senor Pertano was
delegat ed t o Moscow, and expected t o fi nd an Eden. What he did
find created a sensation in Spain.
Speech in America, October 3, 1923.
CHAPTER VI
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY
' The Socialist system has proved a failure. We must return t o
commerce.' Lenin, Speech on t he 4th Anniversary of the
Revolution, Oct ober rgz r
T
HE workers of the world are told a great
deal concerning the industrial freedom
and benefits enjoyed by the Russian
workers, under the Soviet rule, inaugurated by
Lenin. Two aims always transpire, beneath this
flood of propaganda : firstly, to persuade the
workers to start revolutionary movements ; and
secondly, to persuade capitalists to invest cash in
the Soviet Treasury.
The first object is in strict accord with the
fundamental teaching of Lenin, reiterated by his
successor Stalin, that ' victorious revolution in one
country has for its essential task to develop and
support revolution in others.'
1
This extension of
the Russian revolution to other countries is
necessary, Stalin declares, in order to secure ' the
organization of Socialist production.' So impor-
tant does Stalin consider this dogma of industrial
production that he quotes Lenin's own words
whereby to reinforce his ' thesis ' : ' the task of
the victorious revolution consists in doing "the
utmost in one country for the development, the
support, the awakening of revolution in other
countries.''
2
1
Stalin, Theory and Practice of Leninism, Eng. Ed., p. 45
2
Ibid., pp. 45-46.
The second object has emerged from the
practical experiences of the Russian rulers in
endeavouring to conduct the industries of Russia
by bureaucratic nationalism. Experience proved
that this could only be done by living on national
capital. And when a nation takes to living on its
capital, the same results inevitably follow as with
an individual ; the international pawnbrokers are
sought under the diplomatic alias of credit loans.
The genius of Lenin was far too astute and
practical not to perceive the pedantic folly of
applying the pure doctrine of Marx to the indus-
tries of Russia in 1918. Lenin was quite willing
to authorize the slaughter of hundreds of thousands
of Russian men, women, and children, at the hands
of the Cheka ; but the killing of the sources of
money was another matter. Thus, within a few
months of his seizure of all power in the name of
the Workers and Peasants ; and of the decree
of November 14, 1917, by which the Workers'
Control was established over production and
distribution, the finances of all industrial under-
takings, banks, companies, etc. ; and that of
January 28, 1918, nationalizing all industrial,
banking, and trading organizations, Lenin was
negotiating with leading Russian captains of
industry, with a view to creating a State
Trust for ten of the biggest metal factories in
Russia in other words, with a view to estab-
lishing State Capitalism.
1
He declared quite
1
Michael Farbman, Afte.Y Lenin, p. 39 ; and Makeev and
O'Hara, Russia, 1925, p. 250.
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY 133
openly that Russian industry had no hope save in
' the development of State Capitalism ' ; and in
1918 he was driving home this theory, after his
wont, with hard facts. Workers' delegates came to
him wanting their factories nationalized. This
was his answer: 'I always said to them, ''Well
and good ! We have the decree ready and can sign
it in a moment. But tell me. Can you take the
organization into your own hands ? Have you
gone into matters ? Do you know how and what
you produce ? Do you know the relations between
your production and the Russian and International
market ? " And inevitably it transpired that they
knew nothing. There was nothing written about
such matters in the Bolshevik text-books.'
1
But events in 1918 were too strong even
for Lenin. It has been asserted that the
decree issued by Lenin on June 28, 1918,
contradicting his own industrial policy of State
Capitalism, by ordaining the nationalization of the
factories of Russia, was enacted with a quite other
than industrial object. Germany, it is said, was
about to lay hands on all those Russian industries
in which German capital had been invested, to the
amount of nearly 2,ooo,ooo,ooo.
2
By the decree
of nationalization this sensible project on the part
of Germany was instantly defeated. But, as
generally happens, the expropriators in the long
run merely expropriated themselves ; and it was
1 Michael Farbtnan, After Lenin, 1924, p. 43
2 Ibid., Bolshevism in Retreat, p. I 71.
not German but Russian industry that went into
liquidation.
Forced to submit to the policy of Industrial
Nationalization, Lenin chose the form best suited
to his own autocratic will, and also the shortest
road to industrial disaster, that of bureaucratic
control. The Supreme Council of People's
Economy was provided with 70 Provincial Branches
and 6o Central Departments ; and to each of these
creations was given the task of running an industry.
Is it possible that Lenin was not perfectly aware of
the industrial ruin which the erection, in the
summer of 1918, of this machine would entail upon
Russia ? No factory could get its own supplies ;
or procure its own workers ; or even secure its own
food rations. It could not decide its own pro-
gramme of production.
For a short time the workers carried on their
pathetic struggle for the control which had been
promised to them in the watchword of the lying
leaders of the Revolution of October 1917: 'The
land to the peasants ; the factories to the workers.'
But their pitiful ' Workers' Control Factory Com-
mittees ' proved totally inadequate for the work
required of them. In 1918, 45 per cent of the
worker's income was provided by wages; in 1920
this figure had fallen to 5 6 per cent, which meant
that productive work was replaced by efforts at
barter, or by wanderings into the villages in search
of bread and potatoes. For two years the unhappy
workers existed on accumulated supplies ; and on
ceaseless forcible requisitioning of food from the
peasants,. There ensued' catastrophic lowering of
productivity,' and a transforming of the workers
' into dependents of the State.'
1
There also
ensued action by the peasants.
In a famous phrase Lenin once ardently desired
to know of what ' the peasant is thinking when he
lies awake at night ' those peasants who form 8o
per cent of the population of Russia. By 1921 the
peasant had thought out the proposition that to sow
and reap and harvest broad acres in order to
produce grain which was brutally taken from him,
without compensation, was foolishness. So he
restricted his sowings to the needs of himself and
his family, and those of his village priest ; with
perchance a little safely hidden away to provide
for the acquisition of bare necessaries of clothing
and implements. He was very literally living
from hand to mouth, under terror of barbarous
requisitioning. A hideous guerilla warfare in-
evitably developed. Soviet officials tied peasants
up to stakes in their own farmyards, in the
Russian winter, poured a few bucketfuls of water
over them, and left them to freeze to death. Peas-
ants caught a Soviet official and sawed him in half
with a wooden saw. And all the while the workers
in factories and towns came nearer and nearer to
starvation. Hard economic facts brought the
Soviet rulers back to Lenin's industrial policy
of 1918, that of State Capitalism. A complete
1
Michael Farbman, Bolshevism in Retreat, pp. IJI- I86.
136 RUSSIA UNDER THE .RED FLAG
economic volte-face was called ; and in 1921 the
'New Economic Policy' or N.E.P., which was not
really new at all, but the new name of the State
Capitalism of the spring of 1918, was rushed into
action. Decree followed decree, ' legalizing ' the
right of the individual to possess private property,
1
and to carry on private trade within Russia ; and
the right of employers to pay by results. Foreign
trade remained as strictly nationalized as before ;
and, moreover, both private trade and private
capitalistic initiative were placed under State
regulation. The immediate result was that the
workers were almost able to maintain a very
miserable existence on the increase of wages but
not quite ; wages did not rise above 7 5 per cent of
the Soviet worker's income. Production for home
consumption increased thirty-fold, but remained
below the figure for 1913. Eight years have
passed since this dramatic attempt to combine a
strict nationalization of all foreign trade with
liberty of individual management in domestic
trade. Since the beginning of 1925 the Soviet
Administration has not been hampered by ex-
ternal or by civil war ; neither has it been handi-
capped by famine or blockade. It is therefore of
considerable interest to see what Socialism in
their time has achieved for the industries of the
United Socialist and Soviet Republics, in 1925,
1926, 1927, and 1928.
1 One of the first N.E.P. decrees, that of April 7, 1921, gave the
worker the right to possess and to sell part of what he produced
in the factories.
In January 1925 the delays in the payment of
wages were so serious that a Conference was called
to consider this question. According to the Soviet
report of this Conference
1
it was stated that in the
coal mines of both the Donetz and Moscow areas,
from 18 per cent to 42 per cent of the wages of the
miners were in unpaid arrears in January ; and the
metal workers were in similar plight. During
this month the State Sugar Trust owed the workers
nearly the average monthly wage given in that
industry. The delays in payment lasted, in some
cases, for two or three months. Doctors and
teachers suffered similar delays. These conditions
were aggravated by the payment, in the case of the
Donetz miners, of 6o per cent of their wages in
kind, i.e. by the truck system, made illegal many
years ago in England ; with the added Soviet
touch that the Co-operative Societies on which
these orders were made were unable to deliver the
goods, owing to their own scarcity of stock. Mean-
while the Soviet Trade Unions punctually exacted
their own dues from the wageless workers. The
causes assigned for this state of the mining, metal,
and sugar industries are illuminating. They were :
sums owing to the industries, by the State,
retnaining unpaid ; over-production in the in-
dustries irrespective of the capacity of markets ;
use, for production, of sums properly allotted to
wages. The report added that such private under-
takings as existed, under the new system, paid so
1
Economitcheskaia Zhizhn, January 30, 1925.
K
to IOO per cent higher wages, and paid them
punctually. Another sidelight on the lot of the
Soviet worker, in the spring of I92S, appears
in Trood, the official organ of the Soviet Central
Trade Union Committee. In reporting a Congress
of Miners held in Moscow in April of that year, it
was pointed out that workers elected on to the Joint
Boards of Management voted for a reduction in
wages, becoming more managers and workers
in their sympathies ; and that U funds
were being expended on officials salanes, and
banquets, and also were depleted by thefts,
embezzlements, and frauds.
1
In the summer of I925 a Plenary Meeting was
held of the Central Committee of the Russian
Metal Workers' Union. The Russian metal
workers constitute about 30 per cent of the total
number of Russian industrial workers. Trood
reported the following conditions of this
industry :z Unemployment existed to an alarmmg
extent; the total amounted to IO per cent of the
workers in the industry, and the figure was
steadily increasing. The position was aggravated
by the presence of' professional unemployed, who
have lost aptitude or desire for work, and who
live solely on the Trade Unions.' Unemployment
Insurance Relief was only given to 26 per cent of
the unemployed workers, and when the men did
get it, the amount paid was only 30 per cent of the
1 Trood, February 17, and April 7. 1925.
Ibid., May 19-20, 1925.
average wage. The Meeting accused the Soviet
Government of ' systematic opposition to any
increase in wages.' Real wages were falling.
A special report was given, at this Congress, on
the conditions regarding protection of labour in the
metal industry ; it appeared that accidents were
very numerous, amounting to nearly I so per I ,ooo
workers per year, and were on the increase. These
accidents were greatly increased by the adoption
of piece-work. At the Nicolaeff Works the
number of accidents in January was 6s2, in May
962.
1
It was stated that technical protective
measures were hardly ever applied. Women did
night work; young persons of I6 to I8 years of
age did arduous work ; and the percentage of
young persons falling sick was often almost so per
cent of the total employed. The quality of the
clothing served out is very poor. The report
regretfully observes that it is prejudicial to the
health of the workers when there is only one bed
for three workers, who sleep on it in turns. The
absence of proper water supply also promotes the
increasing disease among the workers.
The housing conditions of this, one of the prin-
cipal of Russian industries, in I925 should be full
of interest to advocates of the Soviet system.
' The workers,' says Trood, ' are almost without
exception living in insanitary, and often in
dangerous, conditions. In not a few cases workers
had no lodging whatever, and were compelled to
1
Ibid., November 25, 1925.
q.o RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
pass the night in the factory, or the street.'
1
In the
Donetz area 70 per cent of the workers were living
in insanitary barracks, with an average space of
4 square yards per head. Engineers had only
3 square yards assigned to them, or even, in the
Ural area, only 2 square yards, in the factories
wherein they were lodged. In some factories
workers slept under furnaces, or by the side of the
machines. Whole families lived on the planks of
the workshops. To supply sufficient housing for
the metal workers' industry would require an
expenditure of 23o,ooo,ooo roubles. Nowhere is
the Act of the Soviet Labour Code which fixes the
space per head observed. A rider, tragic in its
impotence, was attached to this report of the Metal
Workers: 'The Union is of opinion that the
State industry displays an insufficient interest in
the question.' Why should a Soviet Government,
preoccupied with the expenses of fomenting
revolution throughout the world, expend thought
and money on the housing of such ' machine
fodder ' as the Russian metal workers ?
2
Yet another echo comes from the voices of the
Russian people in 1925. This time it is the
Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone workers who
are meeting, in Moscow, in June. They report
1
The average housing accommodation is barely 40 per cent
of that ordered by the Soviet Labour Code.
a At the Seventh Congress of the Metal Workers held in November
1925, the average wages were stated to be 62 per cent and 64 per
cent of 1913, the cost of living being doubled. Owing to lack of
raw material, of fuel, and to defective equipment, and to bad housing,
production was 48 per cent of pre-war rate. Trood, November
19-29, 1925.
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY
141
that their average wage was so per cent below
the pre-war figure, although the Soviet State was
showing at that time ' an excess of revenue over
expenditure.' In some provincial areas the wage
was even lower. Insanitary dwellings supplied
deplorable housing conditions. Fifteen per cent
of the employees were out of work.
1
It is not
difficult to ascertain in what directions the ' excess
of revenue 'was being spent by the Soviet Govern-
whil<: the .workers of Russia were living in
sectwns of msamtary houses, on miserable wages
spasmodically paid. '
In this same summer a Circular Letter was issued
by the Central Council of Russian Trade Unions
that workers were deterred from
the Untons by the compulsory contributions de-
manded from unionists, amounting to 10 per
cent or 12 per cent of their wages, for the Associa-
tion for the Development of Chemical Warfare
the Association for the Promotion of the Aeriai
Fleet, and the Association for the International
Support of Revolutionary Parties. This Circular
was issued on July 18, 1925, with the delightfully
naive declaration, ' There is no intention, this time
of talking merely to impress foreigners.' '
The record of Russian industrial conditions in
I 92 S may be rounded off with a few detached
items. On July 1 the unemployed in the city of
Moscow, the capital city of the Soviet Govern-
ment, numbered 144,ooo, and the unemployment
1
Trood, June 6-13, 1925.
figure for the country was I ,2oo,ooo, with a marked
tendency to increase.
1
The percentage of unem-
ployed in receipt of relief was 20 to 2 5. And in
August a report was issued showing that 6o per
cent of the machinery operated by Russian workers
needed replacement.
2
The year I 926 opened with the Seventh Congress
of the Russian Building and Workers' Union.
Reports showed that seasonal workers worked I 6
hours per day at a wage of so kopeks (=one farthing
in English money). The workers on State enter-
prises were working on a IO and I2-hour day, but
were only paid for the statutory 8-hour day, in
defiance of the Labour Code. Housing conditions
were stated to be deplorable. It was also pointed out
that accidents were very numerous-438 were regis-
tered in Moscow alone, in I 8 months ; and that the
Labour Commissariat had as yet (after nine years in
power) done practically nothing for the protection
of the workers from accidents. In the State enter-
prises the whole question of protection for the
worker was utterly ignored ; and the President of
the Union condemned the authorities for' culpable
negligence.'
3
These are the conditions, as portrayed by the
workers themselves in their own publications, of
the mining, metal, and building industries, and of
the postal, telegraph, and telephone employees. In
March I926 the Eighth Congress of Russian
1 Izvestia, July 9, 1925.
2
Economitcheskaia Zhizhn, August 20, 1925.
8
Trood, February 7, 1926.
Railwaymen sat in Moscow, and is very frankly
reported in Trood. It is a report that should be
broadcasted among English railwaymen whenever
they are being incited to support a demand for a
resumption of relations between England and the
Soviet Government, in order to prolong the Soviet
rule over the Russian people. The average wage of
the Soviet railwayman was 7 4 per cent of the wages
in I 9 I 3, and the cost of living was more than
double.
1
The railways were being worked at a
loss, despite a 4I per cent increase of traffic. Owing
to inadequate supplies of material from the State
Industry Department, and the lessening of output,
repairs to rolling stock were never done to time ;
and rolling stock was in very bad condition. Per-
manent ways, bridges, and stations all needed
urgent repairs. Payment of wages was always in
arrears. Accidents were rapidly increasing ; and
this item of the report followed naturally from the
further statements that the staff frequently forgot
to close the signals after the passage of a train, and
that the rails often remained unriveted for weeks
because no one had thought of inspecting them.
There can be no dull moments while travelling by
rail in Soviet Russia. In the five months previous
to February I, I926, 3I engines and 700 wagons
met with fatal accidents. In local stations one man
would be found acting as signalman, porter, guard,
and cleaner. The hours of work fixed by the
1
On February r, 1926, the cost of living in Soviet Russia was
200 as against roo in 1913. Economitcheskaia Zhizhn, February 23,
1926.
Soviet Labour Code were constantly exceeded ; the
statutory 8-hour day was never observed; the men
often had to work on into the night and even to
call in the help of their wives and children ; there
was scarcely a line where the weekly rest of 42
consecutive hours, enjoined by the Labour Code,
was observed; and most engine-drivers and con-
ductors were on duty for 20-24 hours on end.
Less than a third of the railway workers had any
kind of housing ; and many lived in disused railway
wagons.
1
The peasant, in Russia, is so dominant a partner
both in the State and in industry that a complete
chapter must be allotted to him. In passing it
may be noted that in this year of I 926 a Congress
of the Union of Agricultural and Forestry Workers
was held at Moscow, and that the usual report was
put in of disregard of the Soviet Labour Code
regulations ; of wages falling as low as 5 to 6
roubles (Ios. to 12s.) per month; of the arrears in
payment of even this miserable pittance ; and of
workers leaving the Government farms because of
the low wages given. It was also stated that the
Soviet Government Labour Inspectors, charged to
protect the interests of the workers, numbered
65 to the 8,I86,I44 square miles of Soviet territory.
This represents some 33,300 workers per inspector,
covering I 26 ,ooo square miles. Oppressed, perhaps,
with the physical impossibility of inspecting 33,300
persons scattered over an area as large as Non:vay,
1
Trood, March 11-21, 1926.
these inspectors flag in their duties, ' frequently
contenting themsel;ves with taking tea with a
Superintendent, and then departing without any
enquiry as to the conditions of the workers.' The
agricultural labourers were working I2-I4 hours
per day, and were housed in practically unin-
habitable stables and tumble-down huts, in
defiance of the Soviet Labour Code. No effort
was recorded to secure obedience to the Code.
1
At the Fifth Congress of the Russian Miners,
held at Moscow in May I926, more evidence was
given of the moribund nature of the Soviet Labour
Code under Soviet administration-that Soviet
Code upon which European authors and journalists
have wasted, and still waste, so much admiring
energy. The miners were stated, at this Congress,
to be working an 8-9-hour day and technical
experts from I0-12 hours per day; the Soviet
Labour Code day being 6 hours. There was an
increase of 38 per cent in the accidents, over the
previous year ; and serious and fatal accidents
were more numerous. Only 42 per cent of the
Soviet mines were adequately ventilated ; and only
37 per cent of the miners' lamps were efficient.
Overtime was worked, and the bad housing condi-
tions added to the exhaustion of the miners. The
miner got only s-6 square yards of housing space.
The supply of Inspectors was deficient ; and there
were practically no First Aid stations in the mines.
The injured and sick had to be taken some five or
1
Ibid., January 19-31, 1926.
six miles to the nearest medical aid ; and in
winter they often died from the cold on the journey.
The Siberian gold mines had no hospital ; and
patients had to be transported eighteen hundred
miles. In the Donetz Basin one doctor examined
I so patients per day .
1
It is quite easy to die when
engaged in the mining industry in Soviet Russia.
The profits obtained by the Soviet State Industrial
Coal Industry, in the financial year 1925-1926,
were 45o,ooo,ooo roubles.
2
In the Textile Industry the same conditions
obtained.
3
At the Seventh Textile Congress, held at
Moscow in May 1926, it was stated that produc-
tion was only so-6o per cent of that of 1913; and
that wages averaged I 87 chervonetz rouble (about
zs. 5d.) per day. The principle of piece-work was
applied throughout the industry. The Directors
of the State Textile Undertakings were urging a
cut in cost of production by reduction in social
insurance, in upkeep of hospitals and clubs, and
in 'occupational education.' A Moscow delegate
reiterated the usual housing conditions. The
textile workers, he declared, were inhabiting
houses in ruins, and had not more space than 3
square yards per worker, which they occupied
under appalling sanitary conditions. If the worker
slept in a space a few yards square in a half-
ruined factory, the factory management charged a
rent. As a measure of economy the supply of
1
T.Yood, May 12-22, 1926.
2
Montanistiche Rundschau, November 1, 1926.
3
T-rood, May 12-22, 1926.
drinking water had been cut off in the workers'
dwellings, and in the factories. 'The Employers'
Organization,' says Trood, 'are spending funds
destined for the improvement of the condition of
the workers on other objects.'
1
This was written
in May 1926. It is still fresh in English memories
that the Soviet Government subsidized the
English General Strike and the coal strike, in
with grants amounting to some soo,ooo,
2
hop1ng
thereby to promote the arrival of revolution in
England. A tenth part of this sum would have
alleviated at least some of the workers' misery,
under nationalization, in Soviet Russia.
These samples of conditions prevailing in 1926
in separate industries may be completed by the
report on ' Conditions of Labour in Russia ' read
at a Plenary Assembly of the Central Council of
Russian Trade Unions in June of that year. The
President of the ' Labour Protection Department '
of the Commissariat of Labour said that the
fact of over a million unemployed having been
registered had not deterred the imposition of
longer hours of work ; thus in the Ukraine 30
per cent of the workers were working for. a 9--<)t
hours' day. Night work had been authortzed for
women ; also heavy classes of work. Factories
were infringing the Soviet Law restricting the
number of young persons employed in
Accidents were very numerous, and were m-
creasing ; a large part of the safety devices being
1 Ibid., May 18, 1926.
a Statement by the Government, House of Lords, June 17, 1926.

worn out.
1
The Labour Commissariat gave the
following figures :
2
Average number of accidents reported in
I922 . . . . . . 5 I 7
I923 . . . . . . . 768
I
9
2
4
. . . . . . . I 6
5
. I
1925 . . . . . . 204. I
During 1925, accidents had increased per Ioo,ooo
working days, from 2,I7o in January to 3,330 in
November.
It is of interest to note that figures published in
February I926 showed that approximately 6o per
cent of all the wage-earners in Russia were paid by
piece-rates. On January I, 1926, the total un-
employment figure of trade unionists was estimated
at I ,029,ooo ; and of all workers at about
2,oso,ooo ;
3
and it was stated that relief was only
given to 30 per cent of the registered unemployed,
and amounted to only 73 to II roubles (14s. to
22s.) per month. Of all unemployed workers, 40
per cent received no relief, either in payment or
in paid work.'
The unemployment figure for trade unionist
workers had increased by April I3, 1926, to
I,I82,500, an increase in a year of 19I per cent.
6
The President of the All Russian Trade Unions,
Tomski, announced at a Conference held in
October 1926, that small employees of Soviet
Russia earned So roubles per month, ' a sum just
1
Trood, June 10, 1926.
2
Voprosy TYooda, April 1926, No.4, pp. 52-56.
3
Statistika Trooda, No. 3, 1926.
' Voprosy Trooda, February 1926, p. 24.
6
Trood, October 22, 31; November 12-26.
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY I49
sufficient to give them enough to eat,' said Tomski;
but in urban areas 73 per cent could only earn less
than 8o roubles a month, so presumably went
hungry.
Altogether, I 926 was not a happy year for the
workers of Russia ; especially as the cost of living
index-number rose from 200, at the end of I925,
to 240 in May I926.
These official statistics, issued by the Soviet
Government, throw a brilliant searchlight on the
actual conditions of miners, metal workers,
builders, textile workers, and land workers in
Soviet Russia in 1925 and I926. The official
Soviet statistics for December 1926 and for 1927
reinforce those of the two previous years. Here
are a few examples. A delegate to the Seventh
Russian Trade Union Congress stated that:
' There is no single railway on which the regula-
tions concerning hours of work have been observed,
although there exists for this purpose a special
Decree of the Commissariat of Labour. Labour is
exploited just as if there were no labour legislation
at all.'
1
The wages figures for 1927 may be con-
veniently summarized in the table on page 150. In
considering the wages paid it must always be
remembered that the cost of living in Soviet
Russia has increased from an index-figure of Ioo,
in I913, to the figure of 240, in May I926; in
otl1er words it has more than doubled ; and that
even this figure had risen by another IO per cent
(over the previous I8 months) in June, 1927.
2
1 Ibid., December 12 and 14, 1926.
2 Economicheskoie Obozrenie, June I 92 7.
xso RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
z
.....
O 'J:>
.... ....
....
0 'Jj 0 0 0 0 0
I vI"" I 0 I 'Jj I .... I N I 0
.... ....
v U") 'Jj v l'- U") 0 U") 00 U")
('f) \C) \0 N N N 0\00 M
V., 0 ,0 V ;,.,,0 V., U") o0 ,0 0 .0 N 0
1-4: M \0 \0 r-... ('!") r-.. M II") \C) co V\0 0\00 ('I")
Wages ranging from a minimum of ss. per week
to a maximum of 1 ns. per week, with the cost of
living doubled, would represent something less
than a starvation figure for the Russian worker of
1927, if he stuck entirely to productive or ad-
ministrative work. Such wages mean, of course,
exhausting efforts at extra means of subsistence.
But even these wages are not available for all
Soviet citizens. The Daily Herald of October 22,
1927 ,reports the Chairman of the Supreme People's
Economic Council, M. Kuibysheff, as stating that
the unemployment figure for the winter of 1926-27
amounted to 8,soo,ooo persons. At a Plenary
Meeting of the Central Council of Russian Trade
Unions, held at Moscow, October I0-15, 1927,
it was reported that 20 per cent of the membership
of the Trade Unions were unemployed, and that
unemployment was increasing. Only 50 per cent
of the unemployed got any insurance benefit ; and
those who did get it only received 12-14 chervonetz
roubles per month (24s. to 28s.).
1
The Supreme
People's Economic Council does not appear to be
able to save the Russian worker from supreme
misery. And these figures do not relate entirely to
adult labour. The representative of the Young
Communists at the Seventh Congress of the
Russian Trade Unions, held at the end of 1926,
declared that there were more than one million
young persons, under 18 years of age, out of
employment. Unemployment, in the once pros-
perous province of the Ukraine, increased 39 per
1
Trood, October II-18, 1927.
152
RUSSIA UNDER 'THE RED FLAG
cent in I927, the figures rising from I77,IOO m
October I926 to 246,300 in April .
The details of the prevalence of acctdents m
Soviet industry, already given for I925 I926,
are quite as startling for I927. .Accordmg to the
reports given at the All Russtan
Industrial Hygiene and Safety,
2
held m Moscow m
May I927, the steady rise in accidents was:-
First quarter of 1926, per 1,ooo workers, 23'3 accidents
Second , , , 26 3 "
Third , , , 282 ,
And it will be remembered that the medical
services for these increasing accidents are either
deficient or non-existent.
A noticeable feature of an official report in
October was the protest that a reduction in prices
was accompanied by a cut in quality. Thus the
cheaper ' woollen ' goods had .more than
wool in their make-up- and th1s for wear m the
Russian winter.
3
Four years of industrial such as
these is the latest gift of the Sovtet Government,
a Government by no means impoverished, to the
workers of Russia. It is a tragedy the more
moving in that the dawn of such conditions of
healthful and happy labour as are the human birth-
right of every man and woman seemed to be
breaking over Russia in the summer of I 9 I 7. And
now what can be said in the face of such squalor,
such poverty, such helpless, sordid misery, but
that Tolstoian lament sung by the peasant: 'Woe
1 Trood, July 28, 1927.
2
Ibid., May 27, June 2, 1927.
I bid., Oct ober u - 18, 1927.
to you, poor hungry folk, darkness comes once more
over the land.'
The Soviet reports for I928 disclose industrial
conditions heading for disaster. The official
account of the great Donetz mining area is one
of failure in production, sabotage of tools and
machinery, and miserable living conditions for the
miners. ' Economic disorders ' included such
incidents as the appointment of a medical prac-
titioner as chief director of a timber department.
A metal ' famine ' was reported ; and also a tex-
tile 'famine'; and the bread shortage, even in
Moscow, was acute. In July the Soviet Govern-
ment, fearing famine, was buying grain in greater
quantities than had been known since I9I9-I920.
In this month it was reported that 23 per cent of
private enterprises in the once flourishing province
of the Ukraine had closed down. In September
the unemployment figure for the U.S.S.R. was
estimated at 3,ooo,ooo ; and yet the working day
of the agricultural workers was I3-I4 hours. In
the metal industry unemployment had doubled.
The textile workers had less than a living wage.
In November the official organ of the Soviet Trade
Unions, Trood, was asking why ' an all-round
famine continues to be a constant feature of the
workers' lives ; why there are endless bread
queues ; and why there is something wrong with
every commodity you touch.'
1
1
Pravda, February 7-14, 1928; Trood, February 1.5-29 and
November 1928; Golos Textilei, April 3-u, 1928.
L
CHAPTER VII
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE LAND
'The man of the future, in Russia, is the peasant.'-HERZEN.
HE Soviet Government rode into power
eleven years ago on the tactical use of two
popular cries : the land for the peasants,
the factories for the workers. The Russian people,
hungry for land, hungry for industrial as as
political freedom, seized eagerly on promts.es.
The peasants had indeed been carrytng out agrartan
reforms during the whole seven months of the
reign of the Provisional Government, prior to the
Bolshevik coup d'etat in October. And peasant
congresses, held throughout that spring . and
summer of the ' sunniest ' of peaceful revolutions,
resulted in a combined mandate (Nakaz) of two
hundred and forty-two of these conferences, which
proclaimed the land to be the property of all the
people.
This mandate represented the programme of the
Peasant Reformers of the Social Revolutionary
Party, known as the Narodniki. It is the Narod-
1ziki the Peasant Russia Group, which became the
' staff ' of the Peasant Parties,
by Zinovieff in his speech at the Th1rd.
Congress of the U.S.S.R., in May 1925. Zmov1eff
devoted the greater part of this crucial pronounce-
ment on the internal policy of the Moscow
154
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE LAND 155
Government to the necessity of facing the fact
that now, in I 92 5, ' 011ly an agreement with the
Peasantry can save the Socialist Revolution (i.e. the
Soviet Government) in Russia.' He declared that
' the essence of our present policy is based upon
the wide peasant masses,' and again: 'we are
staking on an alliance with the wide masses of
the peasantry.' He laid great emphasis on the
fact that every means must be taken to ensure
success, in this last throw of the Soviet
Government, in view of the admittedly increasing
strength of the Peasant Russia Group. He urged
that ' it is for us proletarian revolutionists to make
every effort to understand the real thoughts of the
real peasant, and to know what the peasant is
thinking when he lies awake at night.'
1
An anecdote popular in Russia six years ago
would have helped to enlighten the Soviet Govern-
ment on the problem of what the peasant thinks of
when he lies awake at night. A peasant deputation
had gone to see Lenin. ' Well, deduska little
grandfather,' said Lenin, to the oldest peasant of
the deputation, ' you should be satisfied now ; you
have the land, the cattle, the fowls ; you have
everything.' 'Yes, God be blessed,' replied the
leader of the deputation, ' Yes, little father, the
land is mine, but you take the bread; the cow is
mine, but you get the milk ; the chickens are
mine, but you have the eggs. The Lord be
blessed, little father ! ' There are two other things
1
Zinovie:ff, Russia's Path to Communism, 1925, passim.
of which the seventy-one millions of peasants of
' Holy Russia ' think, both when they lie awake at
night, and as they till their hard-won lands by day.
They perceive that the officials and emissaries of
the present Government are intent on eliminating
both religion and family life from the villages.
The church is to be closed or turned into a public
hall for lectures and dances ; the children are to be
taken away to Government ' Homes ' ; marriage
is to be a matter of temporary convenience.
1
And
religion and wife and child are things the Russian
peasant holds dearer than life itself. The stubborn
war which he has waged with the alien fanatics of
Communism, during eleven years, has left him vic-
torious in the preservation of his faith, and vic-
torious in the preservation of his home. There
remains the issue of his third battle front, the battle
of the people of Russia led by the democratic
Peasant Russia Group, the Narodniki, for there-
covery of material freedom. As we have seen, the
Third Soviet Congress of the U.S.S.R. was left
in no doubt, in 1925, as to the vital nature of
this struggle ; the continued existence of the
Soviet rule depended, they were clearly told by
Zinovieff, 'on an agreement between the pro-
letariat which is exercising its dictatorship, and the
majority of the peasant population.'
9
The struggle of the peasants seemed, at first
t It is unnecessary to quote the decrees c;>f
Soviet Government making marriage a c1vll contract, bmd1ng
merely so long as each party wishes. The formality of divorce
is hardly a formality at all. .
2
Zinovieff, Russia's Path to p. 12.
sight, a forlorn hope. The masters of Petro grad and
Moscow, the executioners of the Imperial Dynasty
and of a not inconsiderable part of the Russian
people, the improvised Government which could
make a Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany, and
which was gradually admitted to diplomatic
relations with European Powers, the creators of the
Cheka, and of the Red Army, could surely afford
to treat the peasant as a negligible quantity. This
is precisely what the Moscow Government did.
It is exactly what might have been predicted as the
course of action of a group of town-bred political
fanatics, men who had lived the feverish life of
' underground 'revolutionaries, nourished mentally
on the theories of Karl Marx and on ' theses ' read
and discussed in the political clubs of Europe.
How should these men apprehend the sanity, the
stability, the insight, the sagacity of the man who
lives closely companioned by Mother Earth ? The
history of the struggle between the forces of reason
and stability in the villages, and the forces of
violence and revolution in Moscow, during the
last eleven years in Russia, is an epic of heroic

proportions.
At first these two opposing forces seemed to be
hardly aware of each other's existence. Directly
after his seizure of power, Lenin entered into a
momentary alliance with the party of democratic
reform, the Narodnik, representing the peasants.
The result was the decree of November 8, 1917,
declaring that the ' land is handed over for the use
of the toiling population.' In his speech proposing
this decree Lenin declared that the share of the
democratic N arodniki in constructing the decree
mattered not at all : ' What is essential is that the
peasants get an unshakable conviction that there
are no more landlords in the villages. Let the
peasants themselves solve all the problems ; let
them themselves arrange their life.'
1
The decree
announced the handing over of all land, buildings,
and live stock to land-committees, and Soviets, of
peasant deputies. Having thus temporarily ap-
peased the peasants' land hunger, the Moscow
Government applied itself to creating administra-
tive machinery, to the question of war or peace
with Germany, to pouring out decrees, to
strengthening its hold on the town populations, and
to promoting world revolution. The village was
left alone.
The village showed itself perfectly competent to
act. Throughout the previous year, indeed, the
villages had been acting, while Lenin and his
colleagues were talking. Estates had already been
seized, timber cut, live stock and implements
appropriated. Now, in 1918, the general distribu-
tion of the land was carried out by the peasants
themselves, with few disorders or reprisals on the
landowners. ' Thrown solely on their own
resources the peasants carried out the land
partition quite after their own fashion, quite
peaceably and as fairly as could be expected. In
1 Lenin, Speech of November 8, 1917 (October 26 O.S.).
this way a land distribution on a scale unheard of
in the past was effected by the people themselves,
without land surveyors.'
1
This happy immunity from the administrative
activity radiating from Moscow did not last
longer than six months. The first agrarian act of
the Soviet Government was an endeavour to
meet the urgent need of the peasants for agri-
cultural machinery and implements, and other
manufactured goods, all of which had been
nationalized by Government decrees. The Com-
munist theory is that money being the primal curse
of man, all trade must be carried on by communal
barter ; and that the crops of the peasants should
be exchanged for the products of the nationalized
factories. The authorities got as far as filling
warehouses and factories with the needed goods,
but here the State machine ceased to function.
The factory ' committees ' frequently prohibited
the removal of the goods from their factories ;
and the railway committees appropriated most of
what did get despatched. Finally a small part of
the original stocks, worth a thousand million gold
roubles in value, reached the rural food committees
-food, it must be remembered, was already, in
1918, becoming scarce but only to be captured
by speculators. The peasant was obliged to buy
what was available, at exorbitant prices, from
those speculators. To take one single example.
At Harkov a huge factory was stored with stacks
1
Makeev and O'Hara, Russia, p. 255
16o RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG

of agricultural machinery which the Commissars
in Moscow had ordered to be manufactured in two
weeks' on pain of punishment for sabotage.' We
have seen what Cheka punishments are like. The
machinery was promptly made, by the terrorized
workers. But the Government omitted to hold
their distributive officials under threat of the
Cheka ; and the machinery, for which the peasants
were clamouring, and for which they would have
' paid ' in grain, lay idle for six months in the
Harkov warehouse. As the food committees
failed to deliver the goods to the peasants, the
peasants naturally ceased to supply the committees
with grain. The Provisional Government, during
its six months of happy democratic power, was able
to collect eight million poods of grain. In the
following June the Soviet Government could
only collect less than one million.
Having failed to get the necessary grain for the
food of the towns by the ' goods exchange ' system,
through the absence of the ' goods ' part of the
bargain, Moscow reverted to its habitual weapon
of compulsion and class-hatred. The authorities
placed the blame for the lack of grain on the well-
to-do peasants, naming them the ' kulaks ' or
' close-fists ' ; and endeavoured to create a fierce
class-war throughout the villages, between the
wealthier and poorer peasants. The means adopted
by Lenin was the creation, in all villages, of
' Committees of the Poor,'
1
designed to split the
l Decree of June 1 x, 1918.
unity of the village, and to foster class-hatred. At
the same time the well-to-do peasants were dis-
franchised,
1
in contravention of the laws of the
Soviet Constitution. But then, as Mr. Farbman
happily says, ' the Bolsheviks looked upon the laws
they framed as serving chiefly a propaganda
purpose, and in the words of Larin,'' never asked
how the law was made, provided it served a useful
purpose." '
2
Power in the villages was now
transferred from the Soviets to the new ' Com-
mittee of the Poor,' to whom was given power to
assess and collect the grain due from the villagers.
The device of the ' Committees of the Poor ' was
clearly a step to civil war ; and this the Govern-
ment frankly admitted. Lenin saw in them
instruments for awakening ' in the lower ranks of
the peasantry suspicion and hostility towards the
upper strata of the rural community.' Trotzky,
when accused of thus instigating civil war, replied :
' If the requisitioning of food means civil war
between the wealthier peasants and the poor
peasants, then long live civil war.'
Again, the theorists of Moscow had reckoned
without their peasant. The new Committees,
intended as a' leaven of class-war,' to the amaze-
ment of their inventors, united, instead of dividing,
the villages. The village, as one man, at once
condemned these alien bodies of whom Mr.
Farbman gives a vivid description: 'they were
1 Decree of May 14, 1918.
M. Farbman, Bolshevism in Retteal, p. 2 2 1

composed mainly of outsiders, returning soldiers
who had been demoralized by the war, urban
labourers who came to the village in search of food
and opportunity, hangers-on and slackers in
general. These Committees were bitterly hated by
the entire village.'
1
When they did succeed in
efficient action they completely plundered the
peasants in their power, and hardly left them
enough grain for sowing. The corn thus extorted,
moreover, the Committees kept for themselves and
the Government got none of it. A peasant
described them as 'drawn from the lowest types,
cowherds, etc., and beggars just returned from the
towns.' Lenin described them as' strong bulwarks
whence the Government could proceed to a more
rapid transformation of agriculture on Commun-
istic principles.' Trotzky called them 'shock
battalions,' launched against the ' vulture class '
of the more prosperous of the country folk. But it
was the ' battalions ' which got the shock, when
faced with the calm, invincible front of the
peasantry; and by the end of the year (1918)
the theorists of Moscow found it necessary to
deprive the much-vaunted 'Committees of the
Poor ' of their powers.
Food supplies for distribution in the towns were,
however, an immediate necessity for the Soviet
Government which, by making all individual
sources of supply and distribution illegal, had
assumed to itself the responsibility of feeding the
1
M. Farbman, Bolshevism in Retreat, p. 222.
urban population. So the Red Army was next
called in to the assistance of the Soviet Food
Administration. A 'Food Army' was created,
said to have numbered 45,000 men, who were
medically unfit for service at the front. Detach-
ments numbered 7 5 men ; and each detachment
had three machine guns. This army was des-
patched against the defenceless villages. The
shootings and tortures always characteristic of
the Soviet Government were now employed to
extort grain from the peasant. Sometimes the
unhappy producer would be stripped not only of
his own minimum requirements, but also of his
seed for next year's harvest. It is impossible to
conceive of a better recipe for producing famine.
Not content with the machine guns and bayonets
of the Red Army the Food Commissariat also
despatched, during the last six months of 1918,
armed workmen's detachments organized by the
so-called Trade Unions, to extract the grain from
the peasants and also to carry on Communist
propaganda. Nothing could illustrate more vividly
the mentality of the Moscow Administration than
this outpouring of propaganda, supported by
machine guns, at a moment when the bread ration
at Petrograd and Moscow was causing a panic, and
when German troops were plundering the Ukraine.
The peasant, intent on saving some little grain for
subsistence and for seed, and not the least in-
terested in world revolution, met both the guns of
the Food Army and the propaganda and rifles of the
'Trade Union' detachments with an imperturb-
able front. The men of the Food Army and the
Food Police were received in the villages' with the
hatred that attaches to an army of occupation.'
Civil war was indeed created, but not the kind of
civil war desired by the Soviet Government. In
some districts the Soviet Food Commissars
were simply exterminated. Everywhere the
peasant resorted to a weapon far more effective
than machine guns. He turned Lenin's cardinal
doctrine, that the basis of all social organization is
the struggle for bread, upon Lenin's Government;
and he refrained from sowing more grain than he
needed for his own subsistence. Brutal force, and
extortions, accompanied by the revival of tortures
unknown in any civilized countries for hundreds of
years, failed ultimately, as they deserved to fail;
but not until the peasant had been stripped of
everything but the barest necessities of subsistence
by a three years'' Bread War,' which was virtually
a fierce civil war between town and country.
A further failure confronted the Soviet Govern-
ment during these years of the ' Bread War.'
This was the effort, following a decree of February
14, 1919, to organize ' Soviet Farms ' which were
to educate the peasants in advanced agriculture ;
and were also to make the town and industrial
populations independent of the peasants as regards
food supplies. These official farms were financed
by Government loans, were placed on the choicest
land from the sequestrated estates of the landlords,
were provided with the best machinery, horses, and
seeds, and were placed under the management of
town and industrial workers, and cultivated by the
compulsory labour of the local peasants. At the
end of 1920 some 4,300 of these Soviet farms had
been created. In 1921 the Government was
trying to liquidate them, and was even offering
them as concessions to foreign contractors. Forced
labour on farms 'managed' by suburban Com-
munists did not appeal to the Russian peasant ;
and the Soviet Government did not venture
to conscript peasant labour, wholesale, on to
its farms.
Even 45,000 soldiers, with machine guns, cannot
coerce seventy million peasants, possessing the
tenacious courage of the Russian villager. So, in
1919, Lenin tried a different tactic, by issuing
appeals to the people to send grain to the towns as
a loan, which the Government would ' repay a
hundred times.' This propaganda, 'representing
the grain requisition as a loan, was preached all
over Russia with an ardour and energy character-
istic of the Bolshevik.' Both ardour and energy
left the peasant cold. He was too well acquainted
with recent Government methods of corn requisi-
tion ; with the shootings and floggings ; the
burnings of villages ; the driving of men, women,
and children into the woods ; the buryings alive ;
and with the overflowing Cheka prisons, and the
blood-soaked Cheka back-yards, full of fragments
of the bodies of those who had been mutilated
before death. He knew that the Red Terror
assumed more terrible forms in the villages even
than in the towns. He knew of villages in which
every hut was pillaged, the cattle taken, and whole
families, including the aged and the children,
killed. He knew of the country roads, and of the
village streets, lying heaped with peasant corpses,
so mutilated as to defy identification, thrown there
to serve' as a warning to others.' He remembered
the floggings in the Kostroma Province with whips
made of twisted wire which drove clothing right
into the wounds ; the requisitionary visits, when
the Soviet officials made the peasants kneel down
that they ' might conceive a proper respect for the
Soviet power ' the power of the ' Workers and
Peasants' Republic' before flogging; the driving
of a crowd of peasants, in Vologda, into an icy
cold barn, where they were told to strip and then
beaten with ramrods. He remembered that when
the detachment collecting the grain tax arrived in
a village of Saratov, not only the grain but also
the best-looking village girls were' requisitioned ' ;
that thousands of peasant families were deported to
Siberia ; that in the province of Tomsk, in one
year, over 5 ,ooo peasants were shot ; and in the
province of Ufa over Io,ooo. The Russian
peasant was not likely to be willing to make a
' loan ' of his wheat, or of any other possession
left to him, to the Soviet Government at Moscow.
The ruthless ' iron grip ' of Soviet rule,
referred to so frequently by the Moscow
administrators,
1
had failed to coerce the peasant
by any of the five methods devised during the first
three years of Soviet government. The ex-
change of goods for grain had failed owing to the
failure of the Government to deliver the goods.
The effort to create class-war by the ' Committees
of Poverty ' had failed, owing to the whole-
hearted unity of the villages. The brutal extor-
tions, massacres, and tortures inflicted by the
machine-gun detachments of the Red Army and
the armed propaganda detachments sent out from
the towns, left the village decimated indeed and in
agony, but unshaken in soul. The model' Soviet
Farms,' to be managed by townsmen and cultivated
by forced peasant labour, were naturally boycotted.
The appeal for loans of grain to enable the most
ruthless oppressors the Russian villages had ever
known to retain power fell on deaf ears. And
during these experiments by the fanatics of the
Kremlin, the cultivation of the entire country had,
perforce, fallen back to a bare subsistence level.
Production had been killed even in the most fertile
areas. Still, refusing to learn from the facts
staring them in the face, but haunted by the ever-
approaching spectre of famine, the Moscow
Government refused, as though smitten with
blindness, to see that 11othing could save either the
country or their own necks but a relinquishing of
1
'Wit hout the iron Dict atorship of the Communist Party the Soviet
Government would not have ret ained power three weeks let alone
t hree years.' Zinovieff, Congress of the Third 1921.
'Freedom is possible only in bourgeois countries.' Lenin, March
1920.
the Soviet principle of the State Com
Monopoly. In January 1919 the Council of
People's Commissars had issued an appeal to the
people calling for 'No infringement of the Corn
Monopoly ! Down with all private buyings I
Absolute obedience to all the orders of the Central
Authority.' In 1920 they piled compulsion upon
compulsion by the scheme, introduced by Ossinsky
the Food Commissar, for compulsory cultivation of
the soil. This culminating folly of attempting to
transform the entire area of Russia into one huge
State farm, worked by forced labour, amazed even
Ossinsky's Communist colleagues. It had a
strange effect on the peasant ' delegates ' to the
Congress of Soviets, carefully chosen as they were.
' We are sick of Committees and you are adding to
them,' said one delegate. ' If the Committees
were put one on top of the other they would almost
reach the sky. They are standing on the rough
neck of the toiling peasant, and his legs are tottering
and will soon break down.' ' Look at the results
of the State monopoly of corn,' said another.
' Our cattle are destroyed, our bread is taken
away, our agriculture is ruined, Government
pays 7 5 roubles for a pood of grain ; the peasant
pays 1o,ooo roubles for a hut. How can a peasant
continue to work on the land ! '
The peasant was now not only lying awake at
night. He was delivering most unexpected
utterances in Moscow. These were warnings that
Lenin's quick ear readily detected. His speech in
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE LAND
1
6
9
favour of Ossinsky's monstrous scheme of uni-
versal was also a lecture on the futility of
compulsion. The application of the scheme
brought peasant revolts in the south and south-
east. The food shortage was acute and a
general famine seemed inevitable. country
on the verge of a general rising. Even the
of the ' the beauty and
pnde the RevolutiOn, came out in open revolt.
Then, m March 1921, Lenin startled his party
and indeed Europe, by the sudden overthrow of
the Communist economic faith and announced a
' ' '
retreat necessary to save the existence of the
Soviet Government. He declared the abandon-
of of grain by compulsion ; the
of taxes in kind ; and a return to free
tradmg .. It was a retreat ' along the whole line ' ;
the Government had been vanquished by
the Russtan peasant. The famous New Economic
Policy, that of all Communist dogmas,
was won for Russia by the sagacity, the heroic
e?durance, the suffering of her villages. It was a
VIctory won at the cost of hundreds of thousands
of lives, and of immeasurable agony. It
was a VIctory so complete that but for the
horror of the great famine of the
year, a famine which involved forty-three
millions of men, women, and children and left
thirteen million peasants absolutely it
seems probable that the present rulers in Moscow
\vould have been replaced by a true Soviet
M
170
Democratic Government, a Government by the
people for the people, in 1921. .
But the close of the famine saw the VIllages, for
the moment utterly exhausted. It was an exhaus-
tion to which the methods of new collection of _the
taxes in kind contributed, no less than the forcible
requisitioning of previous years. One instance
the devastating effect of these taxes on agri-
cultural stock both crops and beasts must
suffice. This is what occurred on an estate near
Moscow. Up to the spring, wh:n the land was
confiscated, this estate had supphed food for the
family and friends of the to a large
number of workmen and their famihes ; and h_ad
also sent quantities of flax, rye, vegetables, dairy
products, cattle, and horses to the When
the Soviet orders for the confiscatiOn of the
land arrived the owners were allowed to go on
living in of the cottages. Within
months, 'after the cows had spent the wmter
under Communist care, and the fields had been
tilled according to Communist theories,' there was
no longer any milk for the or for the
village, or for sending off to the city ; there was
no flax ; there were only enough rye, oats, and
potatoes to feed the farm labourers for jour months ;
much of the hay was uncut ; and tl1ere was
neither dairy-produce, grain, vegetables, cattle,
nor horses for sale.
Then came a decree of the Soviel Govern-
ment declaring that taxes must be paid in kind.
The villagers on this estate duly got an order to pay
the potato tax. 'Any one,' writes an onlooker,
' but a Bolshevik would realize that vegetables
should be gathered before frost (in the Russian
frosts the thermometer falls to many degrees
below zero) sets in ; and that potatoes should be
harvested in dry weather. But, when we were
having heavy frosts at night, the peasants were told
to bring their potatoes to a pier where the steamer
touched but three times a week . . . the result
was hard upon the potatoes, and still harder upon
the citizen, who was doomed to eat frozen
vegetables all the winter.' Besides the potato tax,
the country folk were also compelled to ' pay ' in
grain, flax, hay, straw, butter, wool, eggs, and
meat. The ' meat tax ' was ordered to be paid in
the form of the living animal. This is how it was
collected : ' The animals, cows, calves, and sheep,
gathered from the entire volost, or district, con-
sisting of some 35 scattered villages, were all
driven to the district cemetery, the only enclosed
place large enough. Some had been driven many
miles, and here they had to wait, without food or
water, till all were assembled. The little grass
to be had in the cemetery was, of course, soon
eaten and trampled upon, and there stood that
mass of bellowing misery for two or three days.
When, at last, they were started on their long
march of some twenty-five miles to the city, many
little dead calves remained in the cemetery, and
other young calves a11d even cows died on the way.
172
A woman who lived near the cemetery, and whose
calf had been taken from her, pleaded with the
Red Army men in charge of the herd to let her
keep her calf and feed it until the last day, but
they only laughed at her.'
The country was not only exhausted by ex-
propriations, by executions, by deportations, by
famine, and 'taxation in kind.' The 'civil war'
which the Soviet Government had created between
the villages and the towns had driven the
back to the simplest class of crop. Here 1s the
state of agriculture in Russia in 1921 : ' The
result of this extraordinary battle between a
peasantry scattered, and living at a low level of
cultural development, and a ruthless Government,
which in the interests of the hungry millions in the
towns was prepared to go any lengths in securing
food was not and could not be, anything but
' ' .
disastrous to an agriculture like that of Russta.
. . . The country went back to its primitive
technique, and became once more an entirely rye-
growing and rye-eating

In the
for existence the cotton fields m Turkestan, whtch
used to provide all the Russian mills with raw
material, grew rye only ; the rich sugar-beet
plantations of the Ukraine were laid waste ; the
tea and tangerine plantations of the Caucasus
disappeared.'
2
Also, the struggle with the
Government had, alas, killed the Russian
1 In 1925 even rye had to be imported ; 35 tons of rye were
bought by the Moscow Government, early in the year.
t M. Farbman, After Lenin, p . 204.
village industries. Formerly, in the district of
Y egarievsk, there were 38,ooo registered cottage
craftsmen ; to-day they number I !ooo ; the
cottage workers in the Moscow district are now
690, instead of 32,000; in the district of Bogordsk
there are barely 700 left out of 5I ,ooo. The loss
of the village crafts means, in many districts, the
impoverishment of the village, cottage industries
having been the chief source of peasant income in
these semi-agricultural areas. These were some of
the natural results of ' civil war ' in an agricultural
country which the unnatural minds of the fanatics
of Moscow had not anticipated. Soviet Russia
had truly become a' heaving ocean of rye.' One
more discerning than Lenin made comment: 'No
doubt Russia is now an ocean of rye, but at the
bottom of the ocean I can see the fragments of
Russian civilization.'
1
Before long the corn-growing areas, which had
once exported eleven million tons of corn yearly,
were unable to provide bread for the home
population ; and the whole of Russia had been
reduced to the state of a corn-importing country .
2
Half of the cattle had gone ; more than half of the
calves ; 70 per cent of the sheep ; So per cent of
the pigs. Even more catastrophic was the loss in
horses, the number of which was reduced by one-
fifth, in a country dependent for local communica-
1
Ibid.
1
In 1923 the shortage of grain required for home consumption
was about fifteen million tons. In 1925 the Black Sea ports were
importing 65,ooo tons of flour and grain.

tions on its horse power. The fall in the standard
of life of the villages may be measured by the fact
that the peasants of White Russia were compelled,
in 1923, to live on substitutes for bread, at a time
when four million acres of the rich black arable
land of the Ukraine were lying uncultivated.
And, as regards clothing, a pair of boots cost the
cultivator 225,000 roubles, the normal price being
8 roubles ; a shirt cost 2o,ooo as against 2!
roubles, and a pair of trousers 25o,ooo roubles as
against 35 A pound of salt cost ss,ooo roubles,
as against 2 kopeks.
1
The increasingly successful
conflict of the peasants, in such conditions as these,
is indeed an epic of valour and endurance.
These conditions, moreover, endured up to
1925, with but little material improvement. In
the year 1924 Rykoff, the Prime Minister of the
Soviet Government, admitted, during a tour
in the Volga districts, that 'all the nation, the
whole State is growing poorer . . . the soil is
yielding less than it did in the time of the land-
lords.' Rykoff added that if, since the advent to
power of the Soviet Government, the productivity
of the soil had declined by 50 per cent, ' the
nation's standard of life will sink in proportion.
The people will wait two or three years, and will
end by saying that the conditions were better when
the landlords were there.' When three years
were nearly up Zinovieff warned his colleagues
in Moscow that the Peasant Parties were a hostile
1
One hundred kopeks went to the rouble.
power that must be overcome if the Soviet Govern-
ment was not to be dethroned. In 1924 Zinovieff
uttered a preliminary warning : ' We must satisfy
the economic requirements of the peasants, or we
are lost. . . . If we fail to solve the peasant
question, our most brilliant manreuvres in the
international arena avail nothing. If we solve it
our dictatorship is secure. If we fail we are then
beaten on our most vital front.'
The conditions in the summer of 1925 certainly
indicated the failure of Moscow to provide ade-
quate sustenance for the peasants. A group of
peasants from the province of Oral wrote in the
Biedusta, the special organ of the peasants:
' There is no bread anywhere . . . and no money
to buy it. The land lies waste. No one comes to
our help.' Another wrote from the province of
Tambov : ' The whole population has been
starving since mid-winter ; the cattle too have died
from starvation, and there is nothing but famine
ahead.' Incomplete lists showed 42o,ooo starving
children in the province of Harkov, and 23o,ooo
in the province of Odessa.
1
The province of
Kiev was registering a deficiency of 16o,ooo tons
of needed wheat. On the northern shores of the
Black Sea cargoes of seed grain had to be converted
into flour. In 1928 the total harvest of wheat
and rye was 3,5oo,ooo tons less than in 1927
2
;
the Soviet State farms were in a hopeless financial
1 A Confer ence, discussing r elief measures, advocated allotting
the proceeds of a t ax on doct ors with privat e practices.
2 Official Soviet st atistics.
condition ; and the peasants were reported to be
commencing open hostilities, at the close of the
year, against the Soviet
When Mr. H. G. Wells obtained his historic
interview with Lenin, in I 920, naturally the question
of the peasant was discussed. ' At the mention of
the peasant,' says 'Mr. Wells,' Lenin's head came
nearer to mine ; his manner became confidential.
As if, after all, the peasant might overhear.'
2
The
peasant has overheard. He is aware that his
present Government has for chief preoccupation
an international movement, called by it the World
Revolution. He is aware that the seventy-one
millions of Russians, which he represents, are
a secondary consideration and chiefly matter for
food for experiment. 'Those,' wrote Lenin,' who
are engaged in the formidable task of overcoming
capitalism must be prepared to try method after
method, until they find the one which answers
their purpose best.' He is aware that during the
international experiments of the last eleven years
the people of Russia have been decimated, tortured,
driven to the verge of starvation and ruin. He has
heard Lenin's declaration : ' The Dictatorship of
the Proletariat means a government of Russia by
the towns. We do not recognize equality as
between the peasant and the worker.'
8
He is not
afraid of Trotzky's threat, ' if we are driven out we
: At the Conference of Agriculturists, Moscow, J anuary 192 9 .
3
H. J!ttssia. in the. Shadows, p. 137.
Lenm m an mterVIew w1th t he English Labour Delegate
Dr. Haden Guest, 1920, '
shall leave to our successors only ruins and the
silence of the cemetery,'
1
for he has been facing
ruin and death since 1918. But, while facing ruin
and death, he has steadfastly guarded his right to
freedom of conscience, his right to maintain his
home, his right to personal liberty. He has
thrown back the international forces launched
against religion by an invincible fidelity to his
faith, against which neither persecution, torture,
spoliation, nor a raging torrent of propaganda have
availed anything. He has thrown back the attack
on the right to possess his own children and to
educate them after the dictates of his own con-
science. He has thrown back the attack on private
property by an indomitable tenacity in holding the
land given him by the peaceful Revolution of
March 1917. He has conquered on the' economic
front ' by steadily refusing to grow corn for the
uses of the international Soviet Government at
Moscow. He has held the gate of democracy for
ten years. Is the moment approaching when he
will make his victorious sortie, and give back the
country of Russia to the Russian people ?
1 Pravda, July 13, 1921.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE PEOPLE
'What cannot happen, happens in Russia.'

Merejhkovski.
HE peasant democracy of Russia is
gradually proving itself victorious in the
epic conflict of eleven years. It has
been a warfare of tenacious endurance. From the
first the villages entrenched themselves behind
certain definite principles ; and, strong in the life-
giving power of all true principles, withstood the
attacks of the most cruel, unscrupulous, and highly
organized international force that the world has
known.
Now, it would seem that the period of trench
warfare is over ; that an advance is becoming
possible. It is an advance that will be welcomed
by all those who work for peace ; since it brings
nearer the removal of the greatest existing menace
to internal peace within nations, and to external
peace between nations. This menace to peace
contained in the activities of the Moscow Govern-
ment has never been concealed by the Ministers
and supporters of that Government. The assid-
uous development of class-war into civil war, in
all countries, the ' spreading of the flame of
178
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE PEOPLE 179
revolution over the world,' are the tasks which
every leader of the Moscow regime, from Lenin
downwards, has declared to be of primary urgency.
When occupying the position not of a hunted
revolutionary, but of Prime Minister of Russia,
Lenin asserted ' Russia must continue to foment
revolution in all countries ' ;
1
and by revolution
the great proletarian had always in mind armed
force, and the tactical strategy of the battlefield.
' Lenin,' said Trotzky, 'was warlike from head to
foot; and war cannot be carried on without craft,
and stratagem, and deception of the enemy. A
victorious war-cunning was a necessary element
of Lenin's policy.' Lenin declared that the coming
of the Soviet Power ' marks the end of bourgeois
democratic parliamentarism, the beginning of a
new era for mankind, the era of the proletarian
dictatorship ' ;
2
and he defined this creation of the
new era in these words : ' The dictatorship of the
proletariat is the fiercest and most merciless war. '
3
The theses of the Congress of the Third Interna-
tional, held in Moscow in 1921, laid down the
injunction that every economic or political conflict
should, wherever possible, be developed into civil
war. ' He is the best revolutionary and Commun-
ist who draws the sword,' was Zinovieff's war-cry,
as President of the Third International, in 1924.
4
The vision of the international forces, martialled
1
Lenin, Speech at Moscow, August 1920.
2 J. Stalin, Theory and Practice of Leninism, p. 59
3
Lenin, Left Wing Communism, p. 10.
' Zinovieff, Pravda, October 23, 1924.
r8o RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG
by Lenin, for the seizure of ' all power ' in
Russia in 1917, is finely drawn by Trotzky:
' The territory of earth, inhabited by so-called
civilized man, is looked upon as a coherent
field of combat on which the separate peoples
and classes wage gigantic warfare against each
other .'
1
""
This vision of the whole world as a field of
combat, full of warring peoples and classes, is the
immediate, though not the ultimate, aim of the
rulers in Moscow. It is their guiding red star;
their inspiration, and their daily preoccupation.
In the light of the international flames they aspire
to kindle in all countries ' the flame of the
Russian revolution will spread over the world,'
says one of their manifestoes they carry out their
tasks of creating the Red Army, of destroying
religion and all moral standards, of fomenting,
always, hatred between class and class, between
man and man.
2
'Hatred,' said Lenin, 'is indeed
'' the beginning of all wisdom '' '
As the creators of a new world, without a
Heaven, national and local interests seem to them
of small value. The formula of their Government
is contained in Lenin's famous phrase: 'Even if
ninety per cent of the people perish, what matter
if the other ten per cent live to see revolution be-
come universal.' It is a formula which just those
1
2
Lenin, Left Wing Communism, p. 61.
I
SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE PEOPLE r81
' ninety per cent,' having inconveniently refused
to perish, are now gradually breaking into
fragments.
The principal apostles of the Communist faith
deplore the tendency of seventy-one millions
of the Russian people to place the peace and
security of the family, the village, the province, the
nation, before the interests of world revolution and
hatred. When the formation of a Peasants'
League was first mentioned, Kamene:ff declaimed
against what he called the ' petty opposition,'
distracting the Communist Party from things ' of
universal importance, including the management
of the world revolution.' To the villages the ruin of
their production, the debauching of their youth,
the reduction of morals to the level, as Mme.
Smidovich said, of the Hottentot, and of the
standard of living to that, as the Communist, Mr.
Bertrand Russell, said, of a Kaffir kraal, seemed
matters deserving more immediate attention than
the subsidizing and organizing of world revolution.
The extent to which the villages have begun to
work for a restoration of their own democratic
freedom, may be measured by the warning issued
by the Soviet Government in January I 924 : ' we
must paralyse the political activity of the peasantry.'
Even in the previous autumn orders were issued
for a re-election of the majority of village Soviets,
owing to the fact that the Government nominees
were being rejected, on all sides. The peasant
was beginning to emerge from his trench warfare.
A year later, in January 1925, Kalinin admitted
that the peasants were openly declaring that the
Government had ' unduly striven to usurp the
entire functions of the local Soviets.'
1
During
this month a Conference of (selected) Peasant
Delegates was held at Moscow, to consider the
reorganization of the rural Soviets. Speakers,
although selected by Government officials des-
cribed the rural elections as farcical ; and a s ~ e e h
by a delegate named lssakin justifies Zinovieff's
lament on the shrewdness of the man from the
land. ' The peasants,' said delegate lssakin, ' say
that the Communists are such jugglers that, if
they want to, they can force through even the
candidature of a horse to membership of a
District Executive Committee.'
The demand for a Peasant Party and a Peasant
League was growing in strength in these early
months of 1925. It was strenuously opposed by
such an outspoken supporter of the Soviet
Government as Stekloff, in whose opinion an
increase of political freedom for the peasant might
even lead ' to a temporary victory of the reactionary
elements.' Stekloff declared that ' the peasants
may be found everywhere agitating against the
Soviet Government.' He further gave utterance
to the amiable hope that the new law requiring
fuller exercise of the neglected right to vote would
'draw out the counter-revolutionary elements,
of which there were a great number concealed in
1
Speech in Moscow, January 5, 1925.
the countryside, inducing them to crawl out of
their nooks and crannies.' In order to combat and
suppress this movement Stekloff added that it
would be ' necessary to sound the very depths of
village life ' which is the very thing that a
Communist is congenitally unable to do. A further
source of disquiet to the Moscow rulers is the
growing influence of rural parish committees,
which were found to be taking corporate part in the
elections, guided by the local clergy. The clergy
are disfranchised under Soviet procedure ; and
this disqualification was the subject of a significant
incident recorded of a recent meeting of village
voters. The official comment is still more
significant. At this meeting the Government
representatives were challenged with the double-
edged question : ' Why is the parish priest
deprived of the right to vote ? He has not
murdered anyone, nor does he teach his people to
steal.' The Government organ, Pravda, reporting
this incident, is both angry and perturbed : ' Such
preposterous language was unheard-of a year ago.'
It is language which, if it is heard often enough, will
bring restoration to Russia, and peace to Europe.
And how deeply the restoration of Russia involves
European peace appears incidentally but very
clearly from a speech by the ' Strong Man ' of the
Soviet Government, and its present leader, Stalin,
delivered early in 1924 in Moscow. Enumerating
the four allies of the Soviet Government, Stalin
accords the third place among these allies to
' conflict and war.' The third ally, he says, is ' in
the highest degree important ; it is the existence
of conflicts and discords among Capitalist States.
If these States had not clutched at one another's
throats our power would not have survived 1917.
I repeat that the existence of conflict and war
among our enemies is our great ally.'
Th& spring of I 92 5 brought more ominous
warnings for the Soviet power. Stalin declared
that the peasant problem might bring about the
'collapse of the Soviet Government.' The
villages were actually demanding, as admitted by
Kameneff, the right to create Peasant Unions.
1
The villagers pointed out that the town workers
had trade unions, and wished to know why the
peasants should not have corresponding associa-
tions. They even had the audacity to demand
freedom of the Press, since the official Soviet Press
served the interests of the towns, and the peasants
wanted their own newspapers. These were
demands, said Kameneff, which the Soviet Govern-
ment would fight. Was there ever a greater irony
than that of the Government of the ' Peasants and
Workers' Republic' fighting the demands of the
peasants for the right to form trade unions and the
right to a free Press ? Once again the inherently
international spirit of Moscow appeared, in regard
to this developing peasant menace. A counter-
attack was launched in the shape of a revolutionary
body named the ' Peasant International,' with
1 Speech at the Moscow Soviet, March Io, 1925.
delegates from the European countries, and from
India, Java, China, Japan, and the' negro colonies.'
A revolutionary manifesto was prepared for circu-
lation among the peasants of all countries. The
peasants of all countries might very well counter
this move by a manifesto assuring their sorely
tried and heroic Russian brothers of their active
support. That such support may yet be needed,
before the people of Russia win back their
freedom, appears from a threat delivered by
Kameneff to the Congress of the Union of Soviet
Republics held in May 1925. If the Communist
system was really in danger, the Government, said
Kameneff, would plunge its opponents ' into
the boiling cauldron of revolution.'
It must be remembered that So per cent of the
Russian peasantry are now smallholders, cultiva-
ting from two to three acres of land per head. Also
the position of the peasants has gained greatly in
security by the enforced ' retreat ' from pure
Communism of the Government in allowing both
the renting of land and the employment of hired
agricultural labour. It is a peasantry possessing a
certain economic independence which is now con-
fronting the power of International revolution.
That power is already uneasy. 'The peasant,'
Zinovieff warns his colleagues, 'shrewdly regards
everything we do.'
1
The peasant also shrewdly
regards the things the Moscow Government does
not do. In one of those ' blazing indiscretions '
1
Zinovieff, Russia's Path to Communism, 1925, p. 45
N
which are the despair of Zinovieff's colleagues he
says: 'Till now Soviet (Communist) work in the
villages has amounted mainly to the collection of
taxes.' A Government that is 'occupied mainly
with the collection of taxes ' is in a fair way to
fulfil the apprehension of that convinced
munist, Mr. Bertrand Russell : ' If the Bolsheviks
remain in power it is much to be feared . . .
that they will increasingly resemble any other
Asiatic government.'
1
Zinovieff points out that
democratic elements among the peasants ' are
displaying initiative ' ; and that ' when
revive economically they inevitably revive politi-
cally.'
The Soviet Commissars are faced with a further
danger. The effort to extinguish freedom of
democratic action among the town workers has
never been entirely successful. Strikes have
broken out from time to time, to be hastily sup-
pressed by shootings and sentences of penal
servitude. Murmurs have penetrated through
the veil that divides ' Soviet ' Russia from Europe.
And we are told that ' the slightest discontent of
the workers is conveyed to the peasantry.'
2
It is perhaps too soon to attempt any estimate
of these slowly moving forces making for peace
1 Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism,
p. 35
s Zinovieff, Russia's Path to Communism, p . 6o.
and for individual freedom. The keynote of
the movement is individual progress. 'The
education of the individual,' writes the 'Peasant
Russia Group,' the 'general staff' of the Peasant
Parties, ' as the condition and cause of social
reform, is the central point in the programme of
the Peasant Party.'
1
Here is the authentic voice
of democracy. It is the spirit in which a great
American defined democracy in the fateful summer
of 1914, the summer when Lenin and his colleagues
were already preparing to launch the greatest
attack upon democratic freedom which the world
has ever experienced. The American democrat
was thinking thoughts, not of war, but of ordered
and progressive peace ; and of the means by
which human progress might be best promoted.
His faith was in the democracy of the West. His
ideal coincides closely with that of the Russian
peasant standing on the confines of West and
East. ' The fundamental article in the creed of
the American democracy,' said Walter H. Page,
' is the unchanging and unchangeable resolve
that every human being shall have his opportunity
for his utmost development-his chance to become
and do the best he can. Democracy is not only a
system of government, it is a scheme of
society.'
2
Anglo-Saxon democracy, whether under King
or President, is a ' scheme of society ' assuring
1
New Agrarian Programme of the Peasant Russia Group. 1925.
Life and Letters of W. H. Page, Vol. I, p. 191.
individual freedom in religion, in education, in
commerce and trade, in personal life. It is a
system based on a profound, if sometimes reticent,
love of country, a swift alacrity to serve and to
defend, if need be, to the uttermost. It is a
democracy which has built up, during a thousand
years of noble struggle, a Civil Power firmly
established for the common good of all. It is
such a system of society which the Russian
Peasant Party has already conceived, in a pro-
gramme of the development of the free individual,
qualifying each member of the State for creative,
productive, defensive, scientific, or administrative
work. It is a scheme of society in which the labour
of the ploughman, of the miner, of the factory
worker, of the transport worker, of the engineer
and chemist, is as necessary to the State as that of
the teacher, the pathologist, the writer, the artist,
the jurist, the Cabinet Minister. It is a scheme of
society which does not demand that the great
traditions and splendid inheritance of the past
should be violently broken up, and thrown out on
the scrap-heap. In it the assertion of another
great democrat finds place : ' The living are
responsible for maintaining the best traditions of
the generations who have gone, and for increasing
the inheritance of the generations to come.' When
the vision of the Peasant Party of Russia, allied
with the peoples of her towns and cities, becomes
established fact, the people of free England will
know how to acclaim the first Ambassador sent to
our shores by the free peoples of Russia, under
the national flag of a great nation, now forced to
acknowledge the red banner of that International
dictatorship which calls itself the Soviet Govern-
ment.
INDEX
A B C of Communism, the, 56
Abortion, child, 77 ; State prac-
tice of, 79
Academy of Leningrad, 71
Accidents, Soviet. See under
Labour Protection
Agricultural and Forestry Wor-
kers' Union, Congress of, 144
Agricultural Community, arrest
of, 54
Agricultural Workers, 151
Anti-God League, 55, 64
Anti-religious Seminary, 58
Anti-religious University, 69
Arcos, I 19, 127
Association for the Development
of Chemical Warfare, 141
Association for the International
Support of Revolutionary
Parties, 141
Association for the Promotion
of the Aerial Fleet, 141
A theism, courses inState schools,
57
Atheist, the (Bolshevik journal),
6o
Atheist Theatre, 59
Baptism forbidden, 58
Berrol, Mr., arrest of, 122
Beebojnik (Bolshevik journal), 6o
Bodny, Damian, 6o
Bolshevik capture of power,
ID-16
Bolshevik propaganda in 1917,
6-16
Bolsheviki, in exile, 5
Books, confiscated, 9D-9I
Boy martyrs, 52
' Bread War,' the, 164
Buddha, 62
Budkievicz, Mgr., death sen-
tence on, 44-45; execution
of, 49
Building and Workers' Union,
Seventh Congress of, 142
Catholic Church, attack on,
44-69
Central Executive Committee
of the Soviet Government, 31
Ckeka (Ogpu) : Co-operative
Societies and, roo; execu-
tions by, 39, 40, 99, 104, I ro-
II2, I2o-127 ; London Ckeka,
u8; organization of, 39, 128;
Peasants and, 102; prisons
and, 104-107 ; prison camps
and, 107, 125; railwaymen
and, roo, 102 ; strikes and,
99, 123-124; Workers and,
98
Child criminals, 8r, 82; drug
victims, 81, 83 ; prostitutes,
81 ; waifs, 83, 87
Children, nationalization of, 58,
87
Children's Communes, 84, 85
Children's Homes, 84-85, 87-88
Christmas, attack by the Soviet
Government on, 6o-63
Church, the ' Red,' 44 note
Church buildings and property,
confiscation of, 43, 55
Churches, building of, 68-69
Churches, the, protest against
executions, 51
Cieplak, Mgr., trial of, 44-45. 50
Cinema, Soviet, 59, 68-6g
Coal mines, Donetz, 137. 146,
153
Coal strike, English, 147
INDEX
Colleges, Atheist, 61
Commissars : creation of, 23 ;
council of, 23-25, 31, 36;
power of, 35-36
Committee of a Hundred Thou-
sand, 12-13
' Committees of Poverty,' x6o-
I62
Communist ethics, 79
Communist League of Youth, 62
Communist Party, General Or-
ders of, 64
Confucius, 62
Constituent Assembly, destruc-
tion of, 16, 17-19, 25
Cost of living, I43. 149, lSI
Cultivation, compulsory, I68 ;
of rye, I72-I73 ; under Soviet
administration, 167
Democracy, suppression of, 34-
35, 187, I88
Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
See Proletariat
Dzerjinsky, Felix: the Cheka
and, II2 ; Commandant of
the Smolny Institute, I3 ;
consular service and, I 19 ;
espionage and, n8; execu-
tions by, 39; hostages and,
II3; torture authorized by, 109
Easter, attack on, by the Soviet
Government, 6o, 69
Education. See Proletcult
Ekaterinodar, executions at, too;
deportations at, xox
Elections, Soviet, 32-34, too,
102, I82
Elevengren, Colonel, torture of,
I26-I27
Executions by the Soviet Govern-
ment,39-49,99-128
Famine of 1922, x6g-170
Farms, Soviet State, 164-165,
175 note
'Food Army,' I63
Food shortage, IS9. I63, 169,
170, 175
France, Soviet Ambassador to, 70
Futurist art, 93
Galitzin, Prince, execution of,
I24
General Strike, English, I47
German investments, I33
Germany releases Lenin, 1917,
I, 16
Gorki, Maxim, 3, 5
Grain extortion, I63
Grain shortage, I72-I73
Harkov, executions at, 108
Henderson, A., 35
Herzen, ISS
Hodges, F., 130
Hostages : peasant, I03 ; Soviet
system of, II3-IIS; mass
shooting of, I20
Housing for Soviet Workers,
139-140, I41-I42, 14S 147
Hygiene, All Russian Congress
on Industrial, 152
Illiteracy, 76
Jacobsen, M. , execution of, I23
Jehovah, 62
Kalinin,3s. I82
l(amenefi,8,24,31, I8I,I84-I8S
l(asatkin, 94
l(erensky, S-9. I3
lliev, executions at, 40
l(ollontai, Alexandra, 77
Komsomol (Young Communists'
League or Communist League
of Youth), 6I, 62-63,78, 8o, ISI
l(ornilov, General, 9
l(remlin, 62, I29
l(ronstadt, Bishop of, 66 ; execu
tions at, Io4
l(rupskaya (widow of Lenin),
76, 8I, 83
l(rylenko, IS, 47-48
l(uibyshefi, M., ISO
l(ulaks (well-to-do peasants),
I6o
Labour Code, I40, I42, I44, 14S
147 I49
Labour Protection in Soviet
industries, 139, 142, 143, 14S
147. 1S2
INDEX 1
93
Lamas, 127
Land, distribution of, 1S8-IS9
Leliana, Madame, 86
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich : and
the bread monopoly, 99; and
capitalism, 176; and the
Chel1a, 113 ; and ' Com-
mittees of Poverty,' I62 ; and
democracy, 187; and the
Dictatorship ofthe Proletariat,
32, 96, 97, I76, I79; on
hatred, I8o; and nationaliza-
tion, I32-I3S ; and the New
Economic Policy (N.E.P.),
168; and the Peasants, I3S.
1ss-1s8, 16x-x62, x6s. 176;
President of the Council of
Commissars, 24, 3I ; and
propaganda, 6, 20-22; and
Socialism, 13r ; and Soviet
Decrees, 24, 30 ; the Soviet
' system 'created by, 10; and
State Capitalism, 132-13s ;
and terrorism, 39, 101 ;
and H . G. Wells, 176 ; and
World Revolution, 9, II , 23,
179, 180
Libraries, 89-91
London, Cheka of, I 18
Lubyanka Prison, the, 49, 72,
104, 116
Lunacharsky, 31, 6o-61, 70,
7S. 82-83. 94. 96
MacDonald, 1\'l:r. Ramsay, 3S
Mahomet, 62
Marriage, 1S6 note
Marx, l(arl, 91
Maxton, Mr. J., 36
Medvedkofi, 118
Merejhkovski, 178
Metal ' famine,' IS3
Metal workers, 137, 139, 1S3
Mexico, 77
Meyerhold, E. V., 61 note
Mikhailovsky, 8
Miners, 137-138; Fifth Con-
gress of, I4S-I46
Monasteries, liquidation of, 53
Monopoly, State, of corn, 168
Morals, Soviet, 77-78
Moscow, 44, 4S. so, s8-S9. 61,
63, 72, 74, 77, 78, 8I- 83, 100,
104, Ill, 122, 129, I37. 141-
142, 163
Moses, 62
Nansen, Dr., 108
Narodniki (Peasant Russia
Group), IS4-IS8
Naturalization, 132-13s
New Economic Policy (N.E.P.),
94. 136. 169
Norway, 77
Ogpu. See Cheka
Order of the Flaming Heart, 122
Ossinsky, 168
Page, W. H., 187
Peasant : Conference at Moscow,
182; destruction of live stock,
173 ; executions, 33. 128; girls
' requisitioned,' 166 ; grain
reserves, 13S; International,
184-18s; League, 181-183 ;
Party, 187-188 ; Unions, 18s
Peasant Russia Group, 1S4-
1S8, 187
Peasants, and grain reserves,
13S. 16o ; and the Provisional
Government, IS4
Peasants, mass executions of, 166
Peasants, under the Terror,
16s-x66
People's Commissars, 31
Pertano, Angelo, 129
Petrograd, I-I9 ; child criminals
in, 82 ; executions at, no-
Ill; Vyborg Prison at, Ios
Post and Telegraph Workers,
14o-141
Posters, Soviet, 61
Priests, arrests of, 43 ; deporta-
tions, 64
Production under the Soviet
Government, 146, 174
Prolet ariat, Dictatorship of, 23,
28, 39. 176. 179
Proletcult (Soviet Education),
s 8,
7
1, 76,
7
8,
7
g-8o, 8
4
, 88-
8g, 91-92, 94-9S
INDEX
Provisional Russian Govern-
ment, the, 3-I5 ; fall of, 20
Public Prosecutor, Soviet, 47-48
Railway men: Eighth Congress of,
I42-I44 ; exploitation of, I49
Red Army, 30, 33, 42, 43, 53, 66,
I03, I28-I29, 163, 180
Religion : persecution of, 38-59,
96, III; and Peasants, 66-67
Robespierre, 2
Russell, Bertrand, 28, 86, 186
Rykoff, 31, 78, 87, 174
Salvation Army, 53
Save the Children Fund, 86
Schools, Soviet, attendance at,
75-76; condition of, 74-75 ;
mixed, 77; and religion, 8o-8I
Sexton, J., 6I
Sexual relations, 76-SI
Shakespeare, 93
Shumski, 8I
Smidovich, Madame, So
Smidovich, P., 67, 89
Smolny Institute, I3, 14, 15
Sobol, 94
Socage, 120
Social Democrats, arrest of, 34,
I02
Social Revolutionaries, trial of,
III
Solvetsky, prison island of, 55.
72, 107-109, 126
Soviets : origin of, 10, 21 ;
First All Russian Congress of,
6-15; incapable of ruling, 26;
superseded, 23-24; Third All
Russian Congress of, 20
Soviet Commissariat of Health,
Decree of, 79
Soviet Constitution, 67
Soviet London Trade Delegation
(Arcos), II9
Soviet Teachers, 74
Spies, Soviet system of, I 15
Stalin, I3I, 183-!84
State Capitalism, I32-133, 135
State Farms, r64-165, 175 note
State Metal Trust, 130
State Sugar Trust, 137
Stelkoff, 182, 183
Strikes, roo, 123, 127, 130
Students penalized, 59; de-
ported, 72
Suicide, epidemic of, 72
Sukhanov, 3
Synagogue, confiscation of, 54
Taxation, Soviet, 17D-172
Textile 'famine,' 153
Textile Industry, Seventh Con-
gress of, 146, 153
Theatre, Atheist, 59, 61
Theosophical Society, 122
Third International, 179
Trade Unions, 65, I38, qr, 147.
149. 151, 153. 163
Tomski, 65
Torture used by Soviet officials,
41, 42, 103, 109-110, 12D-121,
I24-125
Trotzky, 8-19, 30, 61, 79, 130,
162, 176. 180
Tsarskoyeselo, 15
Tver, 87
Unemployed, death sentences
on, 123
Unemployment, 138-139, 141,
142, 147, 148, 151-152, 153
University of Leningrad, 122
Urquhart, Mr. , 98
Vandervelde, M., III
Village Industries, 172-173
Voikoff, M., 126
Wages, 137-139, 141-143 144,
146. 148-149. 150-151
Waifs, child, 82-84
Wedgwood, Col., 130
Wells, H. G., 23, 48, So, 84-85,
!76
Wireless, Soviet, 69
Workers' Control, Decree estab-
lishing, 132; failure of, 134
Working Day, 144, 145, 153
World Revolution, 9, II, 23, 96,
129, 131, 179, 18o-181
Yaroslavsky, 77, 79-80
Young Pioneers, 63 ,
Zinovie:ff, 5. 8, 47, 63, 129, 154,
156, 174-175. 179, 185-186

Russia Under The Red Flag

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A RECORD OF SOCIALISM IN OUR TIME

32 RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG

148 RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG

16o RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG

174 RUSSIA UNDER THE RED FLAG

'What cannot happen, happens in Russia.'

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